"Sedro-Woolley began as a mining and logging hub. In 1909, the local businessmen lobbied for the mental hospital and persuaded the governor's commission who purchased the initial 826 acres. The landscape architects hired to design the campus understood the spiritual dimensions of mental illness and sought to create a beautiful refuge for patients. The master plan consisted of exquisite hand drawings by John Charles Olmsted. Olmsted's father, Frederick, ended the last years of his life in McLean Hospital near Boston, Massachusetts, a mental institution Frederick designed in 1895. When the younger Olmsted had a chance to design a mental institution on the west coast, he brought to the task personal experience of his father's dementia."
"In my mind, I watched the baker's deliver birthday cakes to the wards. I smelled the strawberries in the cannery where women sat in the warm sun and hulled them for jam. I felt the heat of the greenhouse where women potted flowers. I felt their restlessness at night and heard the voices of the nurses down the hall. I sensed their loneliness in a sunroom crowded with patients. I heard the power house whistle calling them to lunch and the clanging of metal plates, saucers and cups."
