Pennhurst State School

A local reporter walked in here with a camera in 1968, and what he filmed helped close the place.

Pennhurst State School and Hospital at Spring City, Pennsylvania, opened as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, which is the language of the legislation that created it. In 1903 the Pennsylvania Legislature authorised it and set up a commission to count the people it was meant to serve. That commission found 1,146 people in insane hospitals and 2,627 more in almshouses, county-care hospitals, reformatories and prisons who it judged were in immediate need of specialised institutional care.

The law laid out two groups of buildings, one for the educational and industrial department and one for the custodial or asylum department, and required room for no fewer than five hundred residents with space to add more. Wesley White, a former president of what is now the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, was appointed superintendent.

The institution ran for 79 years and closed on 9 December 1987 after decades of controversy.

The turning point has a name and a date. In 1968 the reporter Bill Baldini made a series for NBC10 in Philadelphia called Suffer the Little Children, filmed inside Pennhurst. The preservation campaign that now works on the site keeps that broadcast at the centre of its archive, along with pages of comments from people who worked in institutions like it or knew somebody who was placed in one.

If you come here, come knowing what it was: a place where disabled people were sent to live for 79 years, whose conditions were put on television in 1968, and which was still operating within living memory. The commission that founded it counted human beings in the thousands and called the count a survey of need. The people it counted are the reason to read the archive before you look at the buildings.