Haunting hospital memorial reveals lives once hidden in Crownsville graves

It was 2001 when Annapolis historian Janice Hayes-Williams received a call from Crownsville State Hospital, where Maryland had long warehoused Black people with mental illness.

The person on the other end, she recalled, was looking for her uncle, who had fixed up a cemetery, hoping he would look at the one they’d found on the 500-acre campus. Hayes-Williams asked to tag along, and she and her uncle walked the grounds together that spring.

“Never before in our lives had we seen a cemetery with no names,” Hayes-Williams recalled. “He cried. A grown man [brought] to tears that a cemetery, a place where you go to find out your legacy, there was nothing there but numbers.

“I committed on that day,” she added, “to find out who is here.”

Twenty-four years later, Hayes-Williams and scores of dignitaries gathered Thursday to unveil the result of decades of arduous work and political resolve: a stunning, albeit haunting, memorial listing the names of 1,727 patients who died at the hospital from 1912 to 1965 and were buried in mostly unmarked graves.

“This is a day worth waiting for,” Hayes-Williams told the crowd of hundreds. “This is a day to honor the souls that never went home.”

The moment was a long time coming.

Hayes-Williams and volunteers with the Friends of Crownsville Hospital Patient Cemetery pored over thousands of death certificates in the Maryland State Archives from the years when the hospital was operational, 1911 to 2004, often uncovering evidence of the mistreatment, neglect and abuse patients faced there.

Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman remembered visiting Hayes-Williams and her team one day at the archives. He said he looked over someone’s shoulder and glanced at a death certificate preserved on microfilm.

“The cause of death was strangulation,” the Democrat said. “It hit me pretty hard.”

The “Say My Name” memorial, a $340,000 structure paid for with state and county funds, is part of Anne Arundel’s multimillion-dollar overhaul of a place that witnessed one of Maryland’s darkest chapters.

Plans, developed with community input, call for transforming the campus off Generals Highway northwest of Annapolis, replete with dilapidated buildings, into a complex that houses mental health care providers, athletic fields, public gardens and a network of trails. Pittman described the vision for Crownsville Memorial Park as a “place of healing.”

Maryland opened the facility in 1911 on a former tobacco farm as the “Hospital for the Negro Insane.” The hospital was segregated for more than half a century, with white doctors performing experimental treatments on Black patients. Over time, the facility became overcrowded and patients suffered neglect, in part due to inadequate staffing.

Eventually, Black staff were allowed and the hospital was integrated. Care is said to have improved beginning in the mid-1960s. But with far fewer patients as treatment strategies evolved, the state closed it in 2004, leaving the campus to fall into disrepair.

“Today we gather at the site of one of the darkest chapters in our state’s history,” Maryland first lady Dawn Moore said Thursday. “Lives were lost here. Graves were unmarked here, without any regard for life. Unspeakable injustices were carried out here.”

“Together,” Moore continued, “we say in one voice: What happened in Crownsville can never happen again. Never again will we base who is worthy of care on the color of their skin. And never again will we subject the bodies of fellow human beings to experimentation and torture.”

Before her husband, Gov. Wes Moore, took office, the state sold the sprawling hospital campus in 2022 for $1 to Anne Arundel County, which dreamed up grand plans.

The county last month unveiled a new nonprofit center in a refurbished hospital building. Among the first tenants are organizations dedicated to mental health and empowering children from underprivileged communities.

“It is not lost that we will be housed in a space that once denied Black dignity but that will now amplify Black voices,” said Ratasha Harley, the CEO of one of those organizations, One Annapolis, at the ribbon cutting in August.

Before building the memorial, the county had to find a place near the cemetery where patients weren’t buried. That task fell to Heather Roche of Bay Area Recovery Canines.

Roche’s cadaver-sniffing dogs are trained to alert where they smell remains. In the Crownsville cemetery, they laid down every few feet. The sight reduced Hayes-Williams, who was watching, to tears.

“Good God, how many people are here?” Hayes-Williams recalled thinking.

Federal, state and county lawmakers presented Hayes-Williams and the volunteers with citations recognizing their effort.

“In a time when many in this country are looking to sanitize, distort and erase our actual history, I am very grateful that we live in a state and county that not only honors our history and continues to honor the people who are victims of wrongs, but that also stands to learn from it and vow not to repeat it,” said Anne Arundel County Councilwoman Julie Hummer, the chair of the legislative body.

After accolades, remarks and prayers, Hayes-Williams and the cemetery volunteers pulled a covering off the memorial, revealing the more than 1,700 names, organized by the years they died.

Each memorial program contained a name. Attendees were asked to find the name from their program on the wall. Then they grabbed a handful of rose petals and climbed the hill to the cemetery to spread them on mainly numbered graves.

“In a time when many in this country are looking to sanitize, distort and erase our actual history, I am very grateful that we live in a state and county that not only honors our history and continues to honor the people who are victims of wrongs, but that also stands to learn from it and vow not to repeat it.”

Anne Arundel County Councilwoman Julie Hummer

A familiar face was at the forefront.

Becky Estep, who now lives in Annapolis, volunteered at the hospital in the 1970s. She said she served as something of a liaison for patients, relaying their complaints and concerns to hospital staff. She said the patients didn’t want her to reveal their names out of concern that they would be punished by staff members.

“I was told I couldn’t work at the hospital anymore because I wouldn’t give up the names,” Estep recalled.

The experience had a lasting impact on her. Over the past five years, she has visited the cemetery every Wednesday to clean off the nondescript stones and place angel wind chimes next to them.

“It’s important,” Estep said, “that these souls not be forgotten.”