Glore Psychiatric Museum

Missouri's State Lunatic Asylum No. 2 opened east of St. Joseph in November 1874 with 250 patients. The Glore Psychiatric Museum tells the history of that hospital, and of mental health treatment generally, from the hospital's former surgery and outpatient building. It began in 1968, when George Glore, a hospital employee, built full-size replicas of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century treatment devices for a Mental Health Awareness Week open house. They became the start of the museum, and his replicas are still at its center, along with patient artwork, the history of therapies and the case of a patient who swallowed 453 nails.

The razor wire next door belongs to a prison. In 1997 mental health services moved to a new center across the street and the old grounds went to the Department of Corrections, which opened the Western Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in many of the original hospital buildings in 1999. Progress Hall, the white building with broken windows, went up in 1893 for the chapel, barbershop and patient library.

One admission also covers the Black Archives Museum in the same complex. Jewell Robinson, a teacher at Bartlett High School, founded it in 1991 as the Knea-Von Black Archives, and his wife, Geraldine, kept it going until it joined St. Joseph Museums in 2002. It honors Coleman Hawkins, born in St. Joseph in 1904, whose 1939 recording of Body and Soul set a standard for the tenor saxophone, and remembers Lloyd Warner, a young Black man killed by a mob in St. Joseph in 1933.