Waverly Hills Sanatorium

The place is named after a novel, by way of a one-room schoolhouse.

Major Thomas H. Hays bought this land in 1883 as the family home. It sat too far from any school, so he opened one on Pages Lane for his daughters and hired Lizzie Lee Harris to teach. Harris was fond of Walter Scott's Waverley novels and named the schoolhouse after them. Hays liked the peaceful sound of it and named the property Waverley Hill. When the Board of Tuberculosis Hospital bought the land, the name came with it.

What they built there was a response to an emergency. In the early 1900s Jefferson County was ravaged by tuberculosis, known then as the White Plague, and Louisville needed a hospital. The Waverly Hills Sanatorium opened in 1910 as a two-storey facility for between 40 and 50 patients, and grew from there.

It closed in 1961, and the reason is the good part of the story: the antibiotic streptomycin worked well enough that facilities like this were no longer needed. A tuberculosis sanatorium is a building type that medicine made obsolete.

Plans were made at some point to convert the abandoned hospital into a hotel, which is no longer the case. Tours run inside the building today, and it is marketed as a haunted hospital, which is how most people now hear of it.

The Frazier Kentucky History Museum has published a brief history of the sanatorium in its magazine, illustrated with an undated postcard of the building from the Postcard Collection at University of Kentucky Special Collections. That is the version worth reading first, because the real history here is a public health disaster and the medicine that ended it, and the people who died in this building died of a disease we can now treat.