Evansville State Hospital is a state-operated psychiatric hospital located at 3400 Lincoln Avenue on the East Side of Evansville, Indiana. Established in 1890 as the Southern Indiana Hospital for the Insane, the institution has operated for more than 135 years and is one of the oldest continuously operating psychiatric facilities in Indiana.
For generations of Evansville residents, however, the State Hospital has represented more than the hospital itself.
Its sprawling, wooded grounds form one of the most unusual pieces of property in the city. Walking trails, old trees, open fields, recreational areas and lakes occupy land that was once part of an enormous institutional campus and working farm. Long before the surrounding East Side became densely developed, the hospital stood several miles outside Evansville amid hundreds of acres of countryside.
The history of Evansville State Hospital is therefore also the history of a significant portion of modern Evansville.
The Southern Indiana Hospital for the Insane
During the nineteenth century, Indiana struggled to provide facilities for the growing number of people being placed in state psychiatric institutions.
In 1883, the Indiana General Assembly authorized construction of a new psychiatric hospital in Evansville. Officials selected a heavily wooded farm along Newburgh Road, the road now known as Lincoln Avenue.
At the time, the property was approximately three miles outside the city.
The difference between the location then and now is difficult to imagine. Modern Lincoln Avenue passes through the middle of Evansville’s East Side, surrounded by neighborhoods, businesses, schools and medical facilities. In the 1880s, traveling from Evansville to the future hospital meant leaving the developed city behind and heading into the countryside toward Newburgh.
The original hospital property consisted of approximately 160 acres.
Construction took several years, and on October 30, 1890, the Southern Indiana Hospital for the Insane admitted its first two patients.
The institution was also commonly known as Woodmere, a far more peaceful name associated with the heavily forested surroundings. The name has been interpreted as meaning roughly “tranquility in the forest.”
It was an appropriate description.
The hospital was deliberately separated from the city and surrounded by nature, reflecting nineteenth-century ideas about psychiatric treatment in which fresh air, quiet surroundings, work and distance from crowded urban environments were considered beneficial.
Woodmere Becomes a City of Its Own
The original 160-acre property did not remain 160 acres for long.
Over time, the State Hospital acquired additional property until its holdings approached 900 acres.
At its greatest extent, the institution controlled an enormous portion of what would eventually become Evansville’s East Side.
Land historically connected with the State Hospital property eventually became associated with some of Evansville’s most recognizable locations, including Wesselman Woods, the former Roberts Stadium property and areas near what became major medical and residential development.
Modern Evansville essentially grew around Woodmere.
What had once been an isolated institution miles outside the city eventually found itself surrounded by the expanding city.
The hospital itself functioned almost like a small community.
Like many large psychiatric institutions of its era, Woodmere attempted to produce much of what it needed. The grounds included agricultural operations where patients worked alongside hospital employees.
The State Hospital maintained dairy cattle, poultry, crops and orchards.
Patient labor helped operate the farm and maintain the institution.
This arrangement served two purposes. Agricultural work was viewed at the time as a form of productive activity for patients, while the farm also supplied food and other resources for the enormous number of people living and working at Woodmere.
For decades, the institution was remarkably self-contained.
Rather than simply being a hospital building surrounded by a lawn, Woodmere was a vast complex of buildings, farmland, woods, gardens, roads and support facilities.
The Original Hospital
The original State Hospital was an imposing institution.
Historic photographs and postcards show a massive multi-story complex surrounded by landscaped grounds. Its architecture was typical of the monumental public institutions constructed during the late nineteenth century.
Visitors approaching Woodmere would have encountered something dramatically different from today’s State Hospital.
Large wings extended from the central portions of the hospital, creating a building capable of housing hundreds of patients while separating different patient populations.
There also were numerous supporting structures scattered across the property.
For people living in Evansville during the early twentieth century, Woodmere was essentially a landmark on the city’s eastern outskirts.
In 1927, the institution’s official name was changed from the Southern Indiana Hospital for the Insane to Evansville State Hospital.
The Woodmere name, however, remained part of local memory.
The 1943 Evansville State Hospital Fire
One of the darkest moments in the institution’s history occurred during World War II.
On February 9, 1943, a catastrophic fire destroyed the original main hospital building.
The fire was devastating.
At the time, approximately 1,100 patients were housed at the institution. Despite the enormous difficulty of evacuating a psychiatric hospital during a major fire, staff members managed to save nearly all of the patients.
The destruction was so severe that the hospital was forced to close.
Another enormous historical loss occurred inside the burning building: the hospital’s medical records were destroyed.
That fire continues to affect historical and genealogical research today.
Researchers looking for information about relatives who were patients at Evansville State Hospital before 1943 often discover that detailed hospital records simply no longer exist. The Indiana State Archives maintains indexes containing limited information on some patients, but many of the original medical files disappeared in the fire.
The hospital remained closed while replacement facilities were developed and reopened in 1945.
The State Hospital at Its Peak
Evansville State Hospital continued expanding during the middle decades of the twentieth century.
By the 1950s, state psychiatric hospitals across America had grown into enormous institutions housing populations that today would be almost unimaginable.
Evansville was no exception.
The hospital’s patient population reportedly reached approximately 1,500 people in 1954.
Combined with doctors, nurses, attendants, maintenance employees, food-service workers and other staff, the State Hospital campus was effectively a community within Evansville.
But American psychiatric care was beginning to change.
New medications, changing attitudes toward mental illness and a nationwide movement toward deinstitutionalization gradually reduced reliance on enormous state psychiatric hospitals.
Patients who once might have spent years or decades inside an institution increasingly received treatment through smaller facilities or community-based programs.
That transformation fundamentally changed Evansville State Hospital.
The giant campus was no longer necessary.
What Happened to All the State Hospital Land?
This is one of the most fascinating parts of the State Hospital story.
At one point, Woodmere encompassed nearly 900 acres.
Today, Evansville State Hospital itself occupies approximately 88 acres.
So where did everything else go?
Much of it became the Evansville people know today.
As the hospital’s need for farmland and enormous institutional grounds declined, portions of the property were transferred, sold or repurposed.
Land once associated with the hospital eventually became part of the surrounding urban landscape.
Among the areas historically tied to the enormous Woodmere holdings are land associated with Wesselman Woods and Wesselman Park, the area formerly occupied by Roberts Stadium, and property around major East Side institutions and developments.
It explains something that can otherwise seem strange about this section of Evansville.
In the middle of a heavily developed part of the city sits an unusually large concentration of woods, parks, recreation areas and institutional property.
That landscape isn’t an accident.
It is partly the surviving footprint of Woodmere.
The Old Buildings Disappear
For decades, remnants of the older State Hospital remained on the grounds.
But the aging buildings had become increasingly unnecessary and expensive to maintain.
A completely new Evansville State Hospital facility was constructed on the original campus and opened in September 2003.
The modern hospital was designed for 168 patients, a fraction of the population housed on the grounds during the institution’s peak years.
The new building also represented a dramatically different philosophy of psychiatric treatment.
Rather than the enormous institutional buildings associated with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mental hospitals, the replacement facility was designed around modern treatment practices.
The project received recognition for its use of environmentally conscious construction materials.
With the new hospital operating, the remaining old buildings had little purpose.
By 2008, the old State Hospital structures had been razed.
For Evansville residents who remember the old campus, their disappearance represented the end of an era. Buildings that had stood for generations vanished, leaving behind open ground and a landscape whose history is not immediately obvious to someone visiting today.
Evansville State Hospital Today
The modern Evansville State Hospital remains an operating psychiatric hospital administered by the State of Indiana.
The hospital provides inpatient treatment for people with severe mental illness and substance-use disorders and continues to serve southwestern Indiana.
The modern hospital occupies approximately 88 acres on the East Side.
Yet the surrounding property feels remarkably unlike most hospital campuses.
Large mature trees shade portions of the grounds. Roads curve through open green space. Walking areas, recreational fields and water features make portions of the property resemble a public park.
That isn’t entirely accidental.
The park-like landscape is one of the few characteristics connecting today’s campus with the original Woodmere philosophy of placing the hospital in a peaceful natural setting.
The State Hospital Grounds
Today, many Evansville residents know the property simply as the State Hospital grounds.
People walk and jog there. Families visit. Dogs are walked along the paths. Recreational areas are used for sports, and the grounds provide an unusually quiet green space only minutes from some of the busiest commercial areas of Evansville.
There are baseball and softball areas, open fields and walking routes through the property.
One of the most recognizable features is the small lake near Lincoln Avenue.
The grounds also contain a Trail with a Tale, a short walking trail created through a partnership involving the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library and Altrusa International. Story pages traditionally have been displayed along the route for walkers to read.
Beginning in 2025, displays along the trail also began highlighting milestones from Evansville State Hospital’s history in connection with the institution’s 135th anniversary.
The approximately 0.2-mile trail continues the unusual relationship between the hospital and the surrounding community.
It is difficult to find another location in Evansville where active psychiatric treatment, public recreation, local history and preserved green space overlap in quite the same way.
A Forest That Survived the City
Perhaps the most remarkable part of the Evansville State Hospital story is what happened around it.
When Woodmere opened in 1890, the hospital had intentionally been placed outside Evansville.
Then Evansville came to it.
Neighborhoods pushed eastward.
Lincoln Avenue became a major city street.
Commercial development followed.
Hospitals, schools, homes, highways and shopping centers transformed what had once been countryside.
The Lloyd Expressway eventually crossed the area just north of the old hospital property.
Yet pieces of the original landscape survived.
The wooded character that inspired the Woodmere name can still be seen around the State Hospital and neighboring green spaces more than a century later.
Genealogy and the Lost Records of Woodmere
Evansville State Hospital also remains important to people researching family history.
Thousands of people from southwestern Indiana were admitted to the institution during its long history.
Indiana State Archives records indicate that 23,749 patients had been admitted to Evansville State Hospital through June 2008.
Unfortunately, the 1943 fire created a major gap in those records.
The original medical records were destroyed, meaning descendants searching for relatives admitted before the fire may find only limited information through surviving state indexes.
Records from later periods are handled differently and remain subject to medical privacy requirements.
For genealogists with ancestors who lived in southwestern Indiana during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, however, Woodmere is an institution worth remembering when researching family history.
More Than a Hospital
Evansville State Hospital has existed through extraordinary changes in both Evansville and American medicine.
It opened when Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison were major figures in national politics, when automobiles were still experimental machines and when the East Side of Evansville as we know it essentially did not exist.
It survived a catastrophic fire.
It survived the transformation of psychiatric medicine.
It survived deinstitutionalization.
It watched Evansville expand until an institution deliberately constructed outside the city became surrounded by it.
And although the giant buildings, farms, dairy cattle and orchards of Woodmere are gone, the property continues serving the community more than 135 years after the first two patients arrived.
The modern State Hospital is much smaller than its predecessor, but the enormous influence of the old institution remains visible across Evansville’s East Side.
The woods, parks and open spaces surrounding Lincoln Avenue are more than undeveloped land.
They are remnants of a time when a psychiatric hospital called Woodmere occupied nearly 900 acres outside Evansville and operated almost as a town of its own.
Today, thousands of people drive past the property without realizing that much of the modern East Side was shaped by the institution behind those trees.
That may be the most enduring legacy of Evansville State Hospital: the city eventually swallowed Woodmere, but Woodmere never completely disappeared.