Staff Housing, U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, Carville

A fence divided Carville in two. Staff lived in their own housing, while patients lived inside the grounds, often under new names, and could leave only on short leaves without using public transportation. Escapes, mostly by men through holes in the barbed wire, usually earned a first offender 30 days in jail. Stanley Stein is credited with getting the barbed wire removed. Patients regained the vote in 1946. In the 1950s they were allowed to marry, and dormitories were remodeled for couples. By the 1970s admission was voluntary.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 15 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 18 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 18 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 18 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Triumph At Carville: A Tale of Leprosy in America — steps away
• The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul — steps away
• The STAR (Carville's Patient-Published Newspaper) — steps away
• Cage Door of Harry T. Chimpanzee — steps away