Qualla: Cherry Hospital

Cherry Hospital: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY 4.0. On August 1, 1880, a single patient was admitted to a new facility outside Goldsboro that the state called, in the language of the era, the Asylum for Colored Insane. By Christmas of that year, more than a hundred people were crowded into a building meant for seventy-six. For the next eighty-five years, this institution was the only psychiatric hospital in North Carolina that would admit Black patients — the entire African American population of the state, in any kind of mental distress, sent to one place. About three thousand of them never left. Their bodies are buried in two cemeteries on the old campus, roughly seven hundred graves marked with upright brass crosses bearing names and dates, the rest unmarked. A memorial monument was dedicated to them on June 3, 2004, more than a century after the first burial.

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Image: APK | CC BY 4.0

Cherry Hospital: The Acres Outside Goldsboro

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY 4.0. In 1877, the North Carolina General Assembly appointed a committee to select a site for a hospital that would, in the racially segregated psychiatric care of the era, serve the state's Black population. On April 11, 1878, the state purchased 171 acres of land two miles west of Go...

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Cherry Hospital: Lives Inside the Walls

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY 4.0. The early treatment was custodial. Patients who could work were sent to the hospital farm — Cherry Farm grew to 2,300 acres by 1960, producing nearly all the institution's milk, eggs, and pork. In 1884, an early electrical battery was purchased on the theory that electricity migh...

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Image: APK | CC BY 4.0

Cherry Hospital: The Patients Buried on the Grounds

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY 4.0. Two cemeteries sit on the old campus. The first, behind the Chase Laundry Building, holds patients interred between 1905 and 1928. The second, behind the McFarland Building, dates from at least 1927. Together they contain approximately three thousand graves. Around seven hundred ...

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Image: APK | CC BY 4.0

Cherry Hospital: Integration, 1965

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY 4.0. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended the legal architecture of segregation in public facilities. In 1965, Cherry began admitting white patients from the thirty-three eastern counties newly assigned to its catchment area, and began transferring Black patients to facilities in their ...

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Image: APK | CC BY 4.0

Cherry Hospital: The New Building

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY 4.0. On August 30, 2016, then-Governor Pat McCrory cut the ribbon on a new Cherry Hospital. The facility had been planned for years. Perkins+Will of Durham designed the 410,000-square-foot building. It cost $138 million. The old buildings, with their century of accumulated grief, were...

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Image: APK | CC BY 4.0