Bryce Hospital Cemetery #1A

Bryce Hospital Cemetery #1A. . One of four historic cemeteries located on the campus of Bryce Hospital, Alabama's oldest mental health facility, this cemetery features at least thirty-seven marked graves, the earliest of which dates to 1892. There are an undetermined number of unmarked burials. It is speculated that these burials were originally part of Old Bryce Cemetery, located north of here, but were moved during the construction of River Road in the 1960s. Bryce Hospital is one of the most historic and architecturally significant public institutions in the U.S. Established in 1852 at the height of the psychiatric reform movement known as “moral treatment,” the hospital was among the first mental health facilities in the country to employ architectural design and a pastoral setting as essential components in the treatment of mental illness. Through Wyatt v. Stickney, the landmark federal lawsuit initiated in 1971, Bryce Hospital became the center of the civil rights movement for people who experience mental illness.