Maryland State Archives

The AACO Crownsville Oral History Project (COHP) is capturing and storing the stories of the many facets of the Crownsville State Hospital through the voices of those who were associated with this Institution before closing in 2004.

Crownsville Hospital Center was enabled by an act of the Maryland General Assembly on April 11, 1910, as the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland. The hospital was a place to house the African-American psychiatric patients separately from white patients in other state hospitals. The first patients helped build the hospital’s first buildings on land that previously was a farm. The hospital eventually was Integrated on Jan. 1, 1963. However, Blacks and white patients' percentages only became more equalized in the 1970s. Crownsville became a modern mental health facility before it was closed in 2004 because of a declining patient population. Since then, the campus sat largely vacant until Anne Arundel County acquired the property.