The Works Progress Administration built a remarkable amount of America's twentieth-century civic infrastructure: post offices, schools, libraries, parks, courthouses, hospitals. The Morris Memorial commission fit neatly into the agency's mission. Polio was an emergency the country had not figured out how to handle. State governments needed treatment facilities for children whose families could not afford private care. West Virginia got Morris Memorial. The building is a modified U-shape in limestone, with a two-story central section flanked by Y-shaped wings. The central facade carries a domed and louvered cupola above a two-story portico, a piece of Colonial Revival composition that signals 'this is a civic building, and you may trust it.' A T-shaped wing houses the school where children too sick to leave the property continued their education. A boiler house is connected to the school by an architectural feature called a hyphen - a thin connecting passage that gives the whole complex a faintly Jeffersonian feel.

Polio in the pre-vaccine era was a slow, frightening disease for the families who lived through it. The virus typically struck children, attacked the central nervous system, and could paralyze any combination of limbs, the diaphragm, or the muscles needed to swallow. Treatment was largely supportive: warm baths, careful repositioning, physical therapy to keep muscles from atrophying further, iron lungs when breathing failed. Many children at hospitals like Morris Memorial stayed for months. Some stayed years. Schoolwork carried on through the wards because so many patients spent the better part of their childhood inside. Photographs from the period show what those wards looked like: rows of beds, sunlight angling through tall windows, kids in casts up to their waists doing homework on improvised lap desks. It is uncomfortable to look at now, but the children who lived through those wards were themselves matter-of-fact about it. It was what their childhood was.

Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was licensed in April 1955 after the largest medical trial in American history confirmed its effectiveness. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine followed in 1961. American polio cases collapsed within a decade. By 1960, Morris Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children had served its purpose, and the building's mission ended. The institution was closed as a polio facility. The structure was repurposed as a nursing home for elderly residents, an arrangement that lasted nearly half a century - until the nursing home, in turn, closed in 2009. Since then the building has sat empty. Photographs from the abandoned-buildings community show the long corridors, the operating theater stripped down to its tile, the school wing with old desks pushed against the wall. The cupola still stands. The limestone still cleans up in the rain. Inside, the rooms hold a particular kind of silence.

In May 2013, Morris Memorial was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination form, prepared by Jean Boger in late 2012, describes a remarkably intact example of a Colonial Revival WPA hospital. Listing on the National Register does not save a building. It documents it, makes federal preservation incentives available, and adds a layer of consideration before demolition - but it does not require an owner to maintain or restore the structure. Morris Memorial has been empty for the better part of two decades. It sits in Milton, a town of about two thousand people roughly twenty miles east of Huntington along the Mud River. Adaptive reuse is the standard answer for buildings like this, but adaptive reuse requires money and a market, and small West Virginia towns are not flush with either. For now, the limestone walls hold their shape, the cupola still rises above the trees, and a building that once held children in iron lungs slowly weathers in the long Appalachian rain.