TEWKSBURY – When Annie Sullivan, the girl who would become teacher and mentor to Helen Keller, lived at Tewksbury Almshouse it was a very different facility than the presently named Tewksbury State Hospital is today.
According to the Public Health Museum website (http://www.publichealthmuseum.org/), “The hospital was established in 1852 as one of three state almshouses needed to help care for the unprecedented influx of immigrants into Massachusetts at that time. The almshouses were the Commonwealth's first venture into caring for the poor, a duty which had previously been carried out by the cities and towns.”
Built to accept 500 residents, within the first week the facility housed more than 600 and neared 800 just 3 weeks after opening. Living conditions were difficult in this overcrowded situation where according to records they had only 14 employees and spent approximately 94.5 cents per resident each week.
In 1866 they became the State’s first facility to accept chronically insane patients when they opened their doors to the “pauper insane.” According to the history on the Public Health Museum website, “By 1874 the facility had become diversified: 40% was used as a mental illness ward, 27% as a hospital ward, and 33% as an almshouse. The chronically ill population continued to grow, alcoholics were admitted for treatment, and programs providing therapeutic industrial and occupational therapy were added in the 1870's. A Home Training School for Nurses was established in 1894, and the school became a full-fledged three-year program in 1898.”
Meanwhile, Johanna Mansfield Sullivan (better known as Annie) was born on April 14, 1866 to Irish Immigrant parents. According to information from the American Federation for the Blind (AFB), she went nearly blind from untreated trachoma when she was seven years old and her mother passed away a year later leaving her to take care of a home and her alcoholic father.
When her father abandoned the family just two years later, her baby sister was sent to relatives, but Annie and her younger brother, Jimmie, were sent to the Tewksbury Almshouse. The Public Health Museum located at the Tewksbury State Hospital has the original admittance certificate from when Annie and Jimmie arrived on February 22, 1876. It states that Annie had “sore eyes” and Jimmie a “hip complaint.”
At that time men and women were in separate living quarters at the hospital, but many sources indicate that Annie put up such a fuss over being separated from her ill brother that he was permitted to stay with her in a women’s area. She stayed with him until he passed away just three months later.
Annie Sullivan stayed in the Tewksbury Almshouse for four years until in 1880 when she apparently threw herself at the inspectors that had arrived from the State Board of Charities in response to reports of deplorable living conditions in the Almshouse. Annie Sullivan begged them to let her go to school and she was later sent to the Perkins School for the Blind. After several somewhat successful eye surgeries and graduating with honors from Perkins, she accepted a position teaching Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama.
Nella Braddy Henney, in her biography entitled Anne Sullivan Macy, quoted Annie Sullivan about her time in Tewksbury Almshouse, “Very much of what I remember about Tewksbury is indecent, cruel, melancholy, gruesome in the light of grown-up experience; but nothing corresponding with my present understanding of these ideas entered my child mind. Everything interested me. I was not shocked, pained, grieved or troubled by what happened. Such things happened. People behaved like that—that was all that there was to it. It was all the life I knew. Things impressed themselves upon me because I had a receptive mind. Curiosity kept me alert and keen to know everything.”
Meanwhile, the Tewksbury Almshouse became Tewksbury State Hospital in 1900, the Massachusetts State Infirmary in 1909, and Tewksbury State Hospital and Infirmary in 1938, as the needs of the State changed over the years. Facilities were also added for treating contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, and small pox.
The Public Health Museum website says, “Now known as Tewksbury Hospital, throughout the 20th century it has played a major role in the care of patients with infectious and chronic diseases. It is probably the pre-eminent historic example in Massachusetts of a public health institution operated by the Commonwealth.”
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health website, Tewksbury State Hospital’s mission is “to provide comprehensive treatment, care and comfort to adults with chronic medical and mental illnesses.” It currently has a capacity of 540 patients. Tewksbury State Hospital also continues to offer substance abuse programs, a Huntington’s disease program, and a rehabilitation center for the Department of Mental Health. A building on the campus has been named in honor of Annie Sullivan.
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