CROWNSVILLE, Md. — If the walls of the old Crownsville Mental Hospital could talk, they would scream out over decades of pain and injustice at the segregated facility.
A new nonprofit center on the site has given an organization called One Annapolis its first home, and it’s brought Aja Smith full circle.
“When we first walked in, we could feel the pain, the sorrow,” said Smith, “You can tell the patients that were in here that turned inmates eventually were going through very tough things. I have my grandmother and she used to come and witness to the patients when the hospital was still open.”
Hear about a new beginning in Anne Arundel County
The facility closed it doors for good in 2004, and in the decades, which followed, the state had little use for it as the focus turned to volunteer efforts to identify more than 17 hundred graves on the property marked only by numbers.
Three years ago, the Maryland Board of Public Works officially transferred control of the hospital center to Anne Arundel County.
The county, in turn, began working on a plan to turn the 500-acre site into community spaces, spearheaded by its top executive.
“I’m just so glad that this got done before I was gone,” said Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, “You know a lot of the projects you start don’t happen until you’re done, but I get to experience some of this as well, and I will come back here with my kids and maybe my grandkids and say, ‘Look. This is something we started. This is something that’s going to make Anne Arundel County stronger for many, many decades to come.”
Three nonprofits have already set up shop in the center with others expected to follow setting a brighter course for a site known for its dark past.
“I absolutely think that it’s so important not only to embrace that history and name it and claim it,” said One Annapolis Executive Director Ratasha Harley, “but also to use that as leverage and as a steppingstone, as I mentioned earlier, to transform that pain and that suffering and that heaviness into passion and purpose.”
