The story begins with tuberculosis. W.T. Edwards came to Florida from Virginia in 1925 alongside his business partner Alfred I. du Pont and served as vice president of the St. Joe Paper Company. He became the first chairman of the State Tuberculosis Board, and when a new series of state-of-the-art TB hospitals opened around 1952, they were named in his honor. The W.T. Edwards Tuberculosis Hospitals were built in Tampa, Lantana, Marianna, Tallahassee, Miami, and several other Florida cities, all following the same architectural blueprint: long, thin main buildings rising five stories, with smaller wings branching off the central spine. The design reflected the prevailing medical wisdom of the era -- that fresh air was the best treatment for tuberculosis. Every building was riddled with multi-pane windows that could be opened by cranks. The back walls were almost entirely glass. Then antibiotics changed everything. By the start of the 1960s, effective TB drugs had eliminated the need for sanatorium care, and the W.T. Edwards Hospitals closed. The buildings fell under the jurisdiction of the Florida Department of Health, empty and waiting for a new purpose.

The new purpose arrived in 1961, when the Division of Sunland Training Centers was established under the Board of Commissioners for Institutions, replacing the Division of Farm Colonies. The former TB hospitals were remodeled and reopened as Sunland Mental Hospitals, serving the mentally and physically disabled -- mostly children. Only the Orlando facility was purpose-built; every other Sunland inherited the long, windowed bones of an Edwards sanatorium. At first, the centers operated well. The facilities offered swimming pools fitted with rails and plastic wheelchairs, hopscotch courts, shuffleboard, and regular visits from public figures including Woodsy Owl and the state governor. Many patients were enrolled as official Boy Scouts, holding troop meetings on hospital grounds with scoutmasters who came in from the community. The photographs from these years have a determined cheerfulness about them -- evidence that people within the system were trying.

The trying was not enough. Understaffing and underfunding plagued the Sunland system from the beginning, and conditions deteriorated steadily through the late 1960s and 1970s. The Tallahassee facility became the most notorious, suffering not only from severe staff shortages but also from significant physical deterioration of the buildings themselves -- structures designed for TB patients in the 1950s, hastily converted for a population they were never intended to serve. The system cycled through administrative homes: from the Board of Commissioners to the Florida Department of Children and Families, with multiple name changes along the way. As conditions worsened, advocacy groups including the Association for Retarded Citizens began speaking out against institutions that, they argued, treated patients as "sub-human" and subjected them to treatments considered cruel. By the late 1970s, the political and social tide had turned decisively toward community-based care. Most Sunland centers closed by 1980, dispersing their patients to foster homes.

The Tallahassee Sunland received its first ten residents from the Orlando facility in March 1967. It closed in 1983 after years of scandals, funding cuts, and the broader shift toward community care. The abandoned property sat for two decades. A Winter Park businessman nearly purchased the site in 2004 for $4.5 million, but the deal collapsed. Over a year later, the land was finally sold for a housing and commercial development. Demolition of the hospital building and all surrounding structures began in early 2006 and was completed that November. Construction soon began on the Victoria Grand Luxury Apartments, which now occupy the site on Phillips Road. There is no sign of Sunland remaining. The only tangible echo is a local one: relics from the old hospital were reportedly collected and incorporated into the "Sunland Asylum" wing of the Terror of Tallahassee, a seasonal haunted attraction. The children in Scout uniforms, the crumbling five-story windows, the decades of institutional neglect -- reduced to a spook-house set piece.