end of an era at Bryce

Bryce Hospital demolition is happening now.

I could not help but share this photo of Bryce Hospital. I took it a couple of days ago while walking on the University of Alabama's campus. The hospital opened in 1861. At the time, it was near the university, which now owns it.

Another view of the demolition.

The stories concerning this facility are as complex as any other topic in the United States before the war. Before the Civil War, Alabama Senator Robert Jemison saw the value in lobbying for its construction here as a means of revitalizing Tuscaloosa after the state capital moved to Montgomery in the 1840s. Peter Bryce, the first superintendent of the then-Alabama Insane Asylum, reportedly wanted to stay out of sectional politics and thus the first African American patient was admitted into the hospital, which was a segregated institution like most of the South for several decades.

As I looked at this hospital,  I thought of how my  "Antebellum America" students (and grads in a separate course) are presently learning about young southern womanhood via Anya Jabour's study on the subject. I invited them to think about whether Louisa Garland, wife of UA's President at the time Union soldiers arrived in April 1865, was one of "Scarlett's sisters." In other words, was she as headstrong as Scarlet O'Hara character in the 1939 film "Gone with the Wind"?

Mrs. Garland certainly felt like one of those southern women who went against the grain of others' expectations when she reportedly left the dome of Bryce where she and her husband had been hiding during the Union raid. She rushed across campus to the President's Mansion and reportedly asked the Union soldiers to put out the fire they'd started in their attempts to burn the mansion (I am unsure of whether they had also targeted the slave quarters behind it). Most of the rest of the campus was already in flames.

Bryce Hospital circa 1907.

Bryce and the University fit into the narrative of an industrializing and urbanizing Tuscaloosa as the century closed. It's worth it to think about the hospital, which is now relocated off campus, in this context in the months ahead as renovations continue.

It is the end of an era, or perhaps several, and the beginning of a new one. The university plans to save some of the structure for use as an arts facility.