‘A good place to be... just magical’

The 13-year-old kid had a trumpet case, large and “tweedy looking.” Looked sort of like a suitcase. Especially if the city bus driver was new and hadn’t seen the boy before.

“I’d be coming home on the bus in the afternoons (from Hand Middle School), and I’d hop off in front of the State Hospital, and they’d say, ‘Are you sure you want to get off here?’”

The story still makes that kid, Kevin Borgstedt, laugh 40 years later.

What the bus driver did not know was that Borgstedt was home. His dad, Merlynn, was a psychiatrist at the S.C. State Hospital, nee Lunatic Asylum, where he lived in staff housing with his wife and three sons; Kevin was the eldest. Their house was one in a row that curved from the front gate on Bull Street, along a tree-lined drive toward the Babcock administration building — the one with the red cupola that looms at the end of Elmwood Avenue.

Behind Babcock and inside the gate on Barnwell Street stood another cluster of houses, occupied by professional staff who were not doctors.

“You can go anywhere in the state and say ‘Bull Street’ to people ... and they’re uniquely uncomfortable,” says Woody Harris, the hospital’s former training director and its unofficial historian. Yet for people like Borgstedt, the hospital “was a good place to be, ... just magical.”

Gov. Mark Sanford has proposed that the state sell the hospital and the surrounding land, totaling 178 acres, to alleviate its budget pinch, and a number of developers have expressed interest — though the state doesn’t know how much it would sell the grounds for or when.

For most of the hospital’s 183 years, staff members have lived and thrived on the grounds, sharing with those with ailing minds the scents of venerable magnolias perfect for kids’ climbing and streets and sidewalks perfect for roller skating.

Children played cowboys and Indians in backyard tents, and explored the grounds, which in the beginning were given over to trees and creeks and much land not yet developed. When it opened, the hospital lay on the far outskirts of town; as Columbia grew, it remained almost a mile from the city’s center.

For some, the houses were a lure — doctors just beginning their practices could shelter their young families cheaply. For the hospital, the houses were a practical matter — it was so easy to find a doctor or an engineer when you needed him if he lived inside the walls, too.

Borgstedt’s house remains — it’s used for office space — but most of the other uniformly white houses are gone. They have been demolished or sold and moved as close by as across Calhoun Street or as far away as Two Notch Road after State Hospital downsizing, which began in the 1950s after advances in drug therapy began to make it possible for many of the mentally ill to live and receive treatment off the grounds.

In 1963, 1,235 staff tended to 6,580 patients. By 1985, the number of staff had declined by nearly 200. Today, the patient population comprises a few children, as well as adults awaiting the refurbishing of Morris Village.

Staff no longer live on the grounds, either. But there is proof in archival photos and the memories of scores of doctors’ and engineers’ kids that the current governor’s proposal for a housing development on hospital grounds isn’t anything new.

WARMTH, AND PERKS, OF ‘A COMPANY TOWN’

Like some of its residents needing therapeutic care, the hospital always has been both in this world but not of it, a haven from the troubles outside its 8-foot, red brick walls.

Grady Wingard, who lived on the grounds as a boy in the 1930s while his father tended the hospital farm, remembers plowing behind what is now the Hall Institute and attending Charlie Chan movies shown to patients, staff and residents.

“We felt isolated in a good way,” Wingard says, remembering families lined up across Bull Street from the hospital, “waiting for food at a little stone building” during the Depression.

Hardship visited inside the walls, too, Wingard remembers — but “it wasn’t as dreadful.” Inside were a farm, a dairy and a slaughterhouse.

Sometimes the best of the outside came in, too — circuses, City League ball games that pitted patients and staff against neighborhood teams. Eventually, when some of the asylum walls came down, the hospital had a chapel, a library/gymnasium building and a canteen. (Recycled bricks went into the chapel building.)

“It was kind of like a company town,” remembers Bill Hall, whose father, William S. Hall Sr., was hospital superintendent and the state’s first commissioner of mental health, from 1964 to 1985.

There were doctors and nurses; beauticians and barbers; snack store and commissary clerks; farmers and furniture repairmen.

“We didn’t want for anything,” says Robert Milling, 74, a contemporary of Wingard whose father, Chapman, was a psychiatrist.

The Millings had open fireplaces for heat and free coal for their grates. The family’s icebox was kept cold with free ice from the nearby ice house, as well as “free milk, unpasteurized, straight from the cow. (We) got free coal, free electrical, free phones (hooked up to a central switchboard in Babcock),” Milling says.

Leland Crenshaw worked at the hospital for 37 years, starting as head chef in the 1950s. (Later, he managed the commissary, which stocked fresh meats and vegetables.) In 1970, Crenshaw paid $45 to $50 for a two-bedroom house with “a great big basement.”

Crenshaw’s house on Barnwell occupied terraced land, his back yard falling away into fields. In a season’s time, Crenshaw’s plot would yield “four loads of beans, four loads of corn — not a lot” when it came time to feed his own family of four and to share with the neighbors.

For many years, there was free sick call. At various times, the hospital obstetrician delivered staff members’ babies (Wingard and Milling were born at the hospital); its dentists filled their teeth. Its pharmacy filled prescriptions, for cost plus 10 percent. In the 1960s, community troupes sometimes performed at the auditorium. A “mattress factory” repaired furniture.

Patients who were well enough to leave the wards worked as housekeepers and gardeners for the doctors’ families. Most of that ended by the late 1960s after public criticism.

Other perks began to disappear then, too. Those at the hospital say other state employees were jealous of their privileges. The commissary was one of the last holdouts, closing in 1980.

By that time, all of the houses on Barnwell were gone, too — sold and moved.

Some along Bull also had been moved, with the remainder housing doctors for a few short years until being converted to office space.

If Sanford and the Legislature manage to sell Borgstedt’s and Wingard’s and Milling’s and Hall’s 178-acre home, cute little bungalows or trim town houses might rise anew under the massive trees. And the sprawling historic administration buildings might teem with new tenants.

And maybe “Bull Street” again will become that blend of peculiar and special place.

Reach Schweickert at (803) 771-8488 or cschweickert@thestate.com.