Grandview Heights/Marble Cliff Historical Society

One of the most extensive projects accomplished by Frank Packard, the Massillon State Hospital for the Insane was designed according to the Cottage Plan. A total of 18 buildings were designed and constructed for the site. According to the AsylumProjects.org website, "the Cottage Plan (also known as the colony plan in England) is a style of asylum planning that gained popularity at the very end of the 19th century and continued to be very popular well into the 20th century. Prior to the cottage plan, most institutions were built using the Kirkbride Plan which housed all patients and administration into one large building. It was found that the Kirkbride Plan lacked the proper facilities for noisy and violent patients. Cottage Plan institutions usually consisted of a multitude of individual buildings that housed a specific patient type. The buildings were normally two stories tall or less and were often connected to each other with a series of tunnels that were either half or fully submerged underground. Cottage Plan institutions would often be segregated by sex as well as patient type. For example there would be two individual buildings for convalescent patients, one for men and one for women. The two buildings would usually be located on opposite sides of the hospital complex. An administration building would typically be near the front and center of the complex and communal buildings, like a chapel, kitchen, gymnasium, or auditorium were often in the center." According to Packard's original plan, a dining-room building, a kitchen and bakery building, a store house, a boiler house, a power house, a carpenter shop, a laundry building, a hospital building, an infirmary building, a superintendent's residence, a steward's residence and seven cottages were constructed. The hospital started construction in 1893, and operated from 1898 until 2001, but only two of the buildings remain. A short article in The Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada, Volume 3, edited by Henry Mills Hurd , featured the hospital (pp331ff).