Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride believed architecture could cure madness. His influential 1854 treatise laid out precise specifications: staggered wings that gave every ward sunlight and fresh air, a central administration building flanked by separate male and female sections, and vast grounds where patients could find peace in nature. More than 70 Kirkbride Plan asylums were built across the nation. The Athens version, designed by an architect from Cleveland with grounds laid out by Herman Haerlin of Cincinnati -- the same landscape designer behind Spring Grove Cemetery and the Ohio State University oval -- exceeded even Kirkbride's ambitions. The main building could house 572 patients, nearly double the recommended capacity. Ground was broken on November 5, 1868, on land that had belonged to the Arthur Coates and Eliakim H. Moore farms. The asylum that rose on this ridge was meant to be a sanctuary. It became something else entirely.

At its peak in the 1950s, the Athens asylum was a self-contained world: 1,800 patients living on a 1,019-acre campus of 78 buildings. It was also the town's largest employer. The facility maintained its own livestock, farm fields, orchards, greenhouses, a dairy, a steam-heat plant, and even a carriage shop. Much of this labor was performed by patients themselves -- skilled work was considered therapeutic under the Kirkbride philosophy, and it was certainly economical for the state. The asylum served fifteen counties across southeastern Ohio, from Adams to Washington. As it grew, specialized buildings appeared: a receiving hospital, a school, a tubercular ward known as Cottage B, and the Dairy Barn that still stands today as an arts center. Seven additional cottages were constructed to ease the crowding that plagued the main wards.

The asylum's annual reports paint a disturbing portrait of nineteenth-century attitudes toward mental illness. In the first three years of operation, eighty-one men were diagnosed as mentally ill due to masturbation. Fifty-one women were committed for 'puerperal condition' -- postpartum complications -- and thirty-two for 'change of life,' meaning menopause. The hospital practiced hydrotherapy, electroshock, and lobotomy, procedures now recognized as inhumane. Employee qualifications ranged from fully trained professionals to staff with no medical background whatsoever. The institution cycled through names as attitudes shifted: Athens Hospital for the Insane, Athens Asylum for the Insane, Athens State Hospital, and several more, each renaming an attempt to distance itself from the stigma of the last. The decline began in the 1950s, when psychoactive drugs and outpatient therapy made massive institutional confinement obsolete. The asylum closed its doors in 1993.

Three cemeteries on the grounds hold 1,930 people. Of those, 700 women and 959 men lie beneath headstones marked only with a number -- no name, no dates, no acknowledgment that a person once existed beyond the arithmetic of institutional record-keeping. It was not until 1943 that the state of Ohio began inscribing names on the markers. Among the dead are 80 military veterans: two who fought in the Mexican War, sixty-eight from the Civil War, three from the Spanish-American War, and seven from World War I. Two served with the United States Colored Infantry. Beginning in 2000, the Athens chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness took over cemetery restoration, holding annual Memorial Day ceremonies to restore dignity to those who were buried as numbers.

In 1993, Ohio University acquired the property in a land swap with the state Department of Mental Health. The name chosen through a 1984 contest -- The Ridges -- deliberately shed the asylum's identity. Today, the administration building houses the Kennedy Museum of Art. The old Dairy Barn operates as the Southeastern Ohio Cultural Arts Center. The George V. Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs occupies three buildings across the grounds. Cottage B, the tubercular ward perched on its isolated hill, was demolished in 2013 after too many students explored its asbestos-laden corridors. Of the more than 70 Kirkbride asylums built nationwide, only 25 survived as of 2019. Athens is among the best preserved, its future secured by a university that chose renovation over ruin. Each Halloween, school organizations lead tours through the buildings, and the grounds serve the university's Army ROTC battalion for training exercises.