St. Peter State Hospital

In the 1860s, Minnesota experienced rapid population growth due to immigration. To serve the needs of these new citizens, the state legislature passed an act for the establishment of an asylum for the “insane” in St. Peter in 1866. As it filled to capacity and then expanded, it became the primary site for housing mentally ill people considered dangerous or sexually aggressive.

Before the 1860s, the territorial legislature had only outlined procedures related to mental illness. First, it promised to provide guardianship for those insane persons whose families could pay a guardianship fee. Second, it decided to confine insane persons who were considered a threat to public order or safety in poor farms, county jails, or poorhouses. Other families and individuals were left to fend for themselves if they needed assistance. This led to the historically common practice of families locking their insane relative in a basement or spare room.

By the early 1860s, Minnesota’s jails and poorhouses were already overcrowded. The state began seeking means to segregate unemployed poor people for efficiency’s sake, with the hope of one day rehabilitating a portion of them back into the workforce. In 1862, Governor Alexander Ramsey agreed to pay the superintendent of Mount Pleasant asylum in Iowa a fee to incarcerate the state’s unhoused insane population. Their arrangement came to an end in 1866 when the superintendent officially requested the return of all patents due to overcrowding. This forced the legislature to pass a bill authorizing the establishment of a hospital for the insane in Minnesota that same year.

Town leaders across Minnesota responded to the search committee’s call for a suitable site for the hospital. The initial donation to the state, they realized, would attract major state investment in the long term. A 210-acre farm in St. Peter purchased by citizens for $7000 won out due to its open land; attractive landscapes that would soothe troubled minds; the natural protection provided by nearby bluffs; and access to abundant water and wood.

Patients returned from Iowa in December 1866 to live in a temporary structure on the St. Peter site until permanent buildings could be built. Construction was a slow and arduous process lasting decades, but patients were gradually transferred to new buildings as they were completed. In November 1880, a fire raged through the North Wing, destroying the building, killing at least twenty-five patients, and resulting in the disappearance of six more. Despite this major setback, construction continued, and all patients were moved into new buildings by January of 1885.

St. Peter grew rapidly to keep pace with the demand from families and the state. In 1892, the grounds expanded to encompass over 800 acres. Administrators exploited the hospital's growing population through the institutional peonage system, which used free patient labor in the name of "occupational therapy." Patient workers made the hospital effectively self-sufficient, capable of feeding the patients and maintaining its buildings. Further institutional costs were cut thanks to extensive patient labor in cutting firewood, carpentry, and cutting ice from the Minnesota River. A few patients found paid work in the local community.

Despite cycles of construction, crises of overcrowding burdened the hospital as early as the 1870s. As it built new buildings, the state took the opportunity to segregate different patient groups. Ideally, this would have allowed for increasing treatment specialization according to diagnosis (e.g. alcoholism, “feeble-mindedness,” tuberculosis) and prognosis (chronic or acute). As overcrowding began to progressively affect all Minnesotan institutions throughout the twentieth century, specialized attention and treatments were seldom possible.

St. Peter began segregating patients in May 1911, after the construction of the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane. As the name suggests, it was built to house the patients considered too dangerous to stay with the normal population. To that end, the cells were barred, recreation was shorter and more limited, patients were more often confined in straight jackets, and punishments were both more frequent and more severe.

Reforms in the 1950s improved the food, added recreational options, and eliminated restraints as a punishment. In 1957, the institution’s name was changed to Minnesota Security Hospital in response to patient protest around the stigmatizing nature of the original name. In 1970, the Security Hospital expanded to include the Intensive Treatment Program for Sexual Aggressives.

Although both the Security Hospital and the main hospital (renamed St. Peter Regional Treatment Center by Governor Rudy Perpich in 1985) shrank in response to national and local court cases and changes in policy in the 1980s and 90s, they remain open in 2023.