04/11/2026
The Hamilton Spectator
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada •
Thu, Dec 4, 2014
Page 15
Century Manor a grim reminder
Yet, it shows us how far we have come in treating mental health
By Joachim Brouwer
One of the first things noticed upon entering St. Joseph’s Healthcare’s West 5th Campus is the patient photography and poetry on the far wall.
Walking the airy hallways, one comes across titles like ‘Patient Advocate’ and ‘Client Resource Centre’ on shiny wood grained doors. Bariatric and dialysis units are interspersed between the various psychiatric departments. We have seemingly come full circle from the dowdy claustrophobic hallways of the first facility to treat the mentally ill in Hamilton.
Is this why there appears to be a conspiracy to take down Century Manor? The last Victorian era structure of the original Hamilton Asylum for the Insane has been historically designated, but as Pat Saunders, the tireless promoter of preserving our medical legacy has indicated, this means little. A historical plaque that will go in the ground soon may not save Century Manor either.
A low rise of dirt, near the edge of the escarpment, sits where our asylum stood. It was known by many as The Barton Building. The asylum, built in 1876, was virtually a self-sufficient community, its farmlands stretching all the way to Limeridge Road.
1876 was the 30th anniversary of Hamilton becoming a city. The city’s patriarchs were concerned about various disoriented men and women wandering the lower city streets. Whether these people’s illness was the result of economic woes, personal misfortune or mental health issues was not understood at the time. Drunkenness was often cited as the cause of their predicament and jail was the prescribed therapy.
By 1876, the fiefdom of Isaac Buchanan was in disarray and he was forced to sell his extensive holdings on the Mountain. A parcel of land was acquired to contain the asylum and its outbuildings, including a root cellar, which is incorporated in Mohawk College’s pub.
The architectural template of Hamilton’s Asylum was provided by Pennsylvania architect Thomas Kirkbride who was an ardent believer in “moral treatment.” Moral treatment was the idea that a symmetrically pleasing, exquisitely landscaped edifice housing the psychically disturbed would cure them.
The classic asylum design of Kirkbride consisted of a central administration building, flanked on either side by wings set in stepped-back configuration, resembling birds in flight.
The most severely disturbed patients were housed in the outer wings and would be moved to interior areas as they got better. A phalanx of doctor’s offices, laboratories and operating theatres occupied the central part of the classic asylum. The medical profession of psychiatry in fact developed in lock step with the concept of the asylum. Hamilton’s asylum would add numerous outlying buildings to the Barton Building, including Century Manor. Unlike other public buildings, a city’s asylum did not instil the same passion among conservators.
Most asylums were torn down, converted to other uses or outright abandoned. The ruins of many American asylums have become subjects of paranormal investigations and ghost tours.
The almost otherworldly images of communal shower stalls, restraining rooms and operating rooms where long discredited psycho-surgeries such as lobotomies and tractotomies were performed, are truly macabre reminders of a different era in the treatment of mental illness.
The Barton Building was possibly the most dramatically situated of all North American asylums, looking as it did over the lower city. A driveway wound its way to scenic Beckett Drive and eventually down to Queen Street.
This picturesque route and the startling spectacle of mentally ill patients, ambling on the grounds of the asylum became a popular Sunday outing.
In 1975, the original asylum was torn down. The last patients had already been transferred to the Auchmar complex.
Leanne Pluthero, who has galvanized the community in saving Dundas’s Hermitage from being reduced to a shadow of its former self, has started an intensive social media campaign to bring attention to saving Century Manor.
The Century Manor task force will be having a public information meeting in The Hamilton Spectator’s auditorium Monday, Dec. 8 at 5 p.m. Please attend if you are interested.
Joachim Brouwer is a member of the Joint Plaquing Sub Committee of the Hamilton Historical Board and Municipal Heritage Council and Mad Pride Hamilton.
