Explore Dix Park: Interpretive Signage
Virtual Exhibit of Historical Signage in Dorothea Dix Park
The First People
The Heritage of Indigenous Communities
Starting about 10,000 BCE, Indigenous people came to the American South as hunter gatherers, camping near rivers and streams.
By 1,000 CE, Indigenous people, like the Euro-American settlers who came after them, had become farmers. They established semi-permanent river villages and grew corn, squash, beans, pumpkins, and sunflowers. In 1701, English explorer John Lawson traveled across North Carolina, noting the Eno and Tuscarora tribal territories in this region. Little evidence remains of Native people’s daily life here, but this land is believed to have served as hunting grounds. Colonization ultimately led to the displacement and destruction of Native communities throughout the North Carolina Piedmont.
This Land is Indigenous Land
In 2020, the Triangle Native American Society, in partnership with Dix Park Conservancy and the City of Raleigh, led a Native American land blessing and acknowledgment ceremony at Dix Park. One of only a few such ceremonies conducted in North Carolina, the acknowledgement recognizes and honors this Indigenous land as Coharie, Cherokee, Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi, Sappony, and Waccamaw Siouan.
Spring Hill
A Working Plantation, a People Enslaved
For over 100 years beginning in the late 1700s, this land was part of the Spring Hill plantation owned by the Hunter family and worked by enslaved African Americans. Theophilus Hunter Sr. was a Revolutionary War officer, Justice of the Peace, and plantation owner who was instrumental in founding the City of Raleigh.
When Theophilus Hunter Sr. died in 1798, he willed his property to his family including the Spring Hill plantation to his eldest son and over 59 enslaved people to his wife, children and grandchildren.
Theophilus Hunter Jr. had enslaved Africans build the house you see in front of you about 1818. The gravesite of Theophilus Hunter Sr. is located to the left of the house and is the oldest known marked grave in Wake County.
The living quarters and gravesites of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the Spring Hill plantation have not been located. In 1850, the Hunter family sold 29 acres to the State of North Carolina for the construction of the state’s first mental health hospital. Spring Hill House is located on NC State University Centennial Campus East property.
Rediscovering the Legacy of John Hunter
Until emancipation following the end of the Civil War in 1865, enslaved African Americans lived and worked on Spring Hill.
One of the enslaved men was John Hunter. According to a Raleigh News obituary in 1876, John Hunter lived until the astonishing age of 112. Research by city historians has found a remarkable family tree linking John Hunter to descendants living in Raleigh, Washington DC and New York. John Hunter’s family tree includes Stewart Ellison, an enslaved carpenter who worked on the original hospital building and later became a North Carolina state legislator; Spanish-American War veterans; Tuskegee Airmen; women who defined modern dance and shattered glass ceilings on Wall Street; and many other influential African Americans who helped shape our country.
Land Rooted in Agriculture
An Enslaved Workforce
For nearly 100 years beginning in the late 1700s, this land was part of the Spring Hill plantation owned by the Hunter family. Enslaved African Americans were forced to work the fields and raise livestock for sale in addition to food to support the family and plantation operations. The main crops included corn, wheat, potatoes, beans, oats, and flax though most of the plantation’s income came from raising hogs.
The Spring Hill plantation was eventually divided amongst the Hunter family and much of it sold to other landowners. In 1850 the family sold 29 acres to the State for the construction of North Carolina’s first mental health hospital.
Farming as Therapy
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, mental health hospitals all over the country included spacious grounds for therapeutic gardening and farming – with fresh air, connection to nature, and meaningful work thought to be central to patient wellbeing. Farming provided not only economic self-sufficiency for the hospital, but also was considered therapy for some patients. Crops and livestock on the land fed the patients and staff, fibrous plants were made into cloth for uniforms and clothing, and timber provided wood to heat the hospital.
By the 1960s, the farm at Dix Hospital had grown to nearly 2,000 acres and included a swine operation, a working dairy, chicken coops, a greenhouse, cropland, and hay, grain and timber operations.
In the 1970s, mental health care reformers challenged the notion of farming as therapy, and occupational farming operations at Dix ceased. By 1974, no patients were working the land, and in the decades to come, the State transferred most of the farm property to North Carolina State University and the Department of Agriculture.
Dorothea Dix & the Founding of the Hospital
A Place for Respite and Healing
People living with mental illness in North Carolina and throughout the United States had few places to turn before reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix began her work in the early 1800s. The care they received was often in poorhouses, jails, and at home in solitary confinement, which resulted in widespread abuse. Dorothea Dix advocated “moral treatment” and a new type of institution – the asylum – to be a sanctuary and refuge for those living with mental illness. Moral treatment was based on the belief that people could recover from mental illness and be cured if treated kindly in peaceful, country settings and given meaningful work and recreation.
North Carolina was one of the last states to establish a facility dedicated to the treatment of mental illness. After initially being denied in 1848, Dorothea Dix successfully persuaded the state in 1850 to allocate funds to build an asylum. A legislative commission responsible for choosing the site for the new facility declared:
“(A)fter carefully examining the whole country in the vicinity of Raleigh, we chose a location west of the city and about one mile distant. … This location has a commanding view of the city and is believed to be perfectly healthy. The grounds are beautifully undulating and susceptible of improvement.”
In February 1856 the hospital, then known as the North Carolina Insane Asylum, opened to patients.
Architecture of an Asylum
Renowned architect, Alexander J. Davis, was hired to design North Carolina’s first mental health hospital. Davis is known for designing several notable buildings in the state, including the State Capitol and Old East and Old West on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. Davis modeled the asylum on the design principles of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, who believed that exposure to natural light and fresh air were key components of treatment. Those with the most severe illnesses were housed on the outer ends of the hospital wings and, as they improved, moved progressively closer to the central portal through which they could exit back into society.
The Civil War Arrives in Raleigh
Union Troops and the Hospital
In April 1865, 89,000 of General Sherman’s troops occupied Raleigh during the last days of the Civil War. Many Union soldiers camped on the hospital’s grounds and interacted with patients.
On the night of April 17, 1865, learning of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, soldiers of the Union Army camped at the hospital marched toward downtown Raleigh intent on burning the city down. Union Major General John A. Logan famously saved the capital city by intercepting the troops, threatening to fire on them with their own artillery unless they returned to camp.
The presence of Union troops also forced the hospital to integrate as commanders required doctors to treat newly freed African Americans, starting with a Wake County man named Isaac admitted with the cause noted as ‘the war’. Integration of the hospital lasted until Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era when North Carolina opened a separate facility in Goldsboro for African American patients in 1880. Dorothea Dix Hospital reintegrated in the 1960s.
Raleigh’s Earthwork
During the Civil War, an earthwork was constructed around Raleigh to protect the capital from Union forces heading inland from Eastern North Carolina. Enslaved African Americans, brought in from 15 different counties, were forced to build the earthwork – a large embankment of soil that formed a fortification around the city – cutting through the state hospital property.
Life on Dix Hill
A Thriving Community
The people living and working on the hospital campus, commonly called “Dix Hill,” built a self-sufficient community largely separate from the city of Raleigh. The hospital campus had its own water supply, a farm that supplied nearly all the food the hospital community consumed, a kitchen, a bakery, a smokehouse, an icehouse and boilers to heat buildings with steam. As part of their occupational therapy, female patients made many linens and clothes and male patients assisted with farming and maintaining the grounds and gardens.
As the patient population grew, so did the number of staff. Many hospital staff members were provided housing on the grounds, resulting in a close-knit community. In the 1910s and ’20s, dorms were built to house nurses. The three stone houses at the main entrance were built in the 1920s for the hospital superintendent and his family, the head physician, and the gatekeeper. From the 1930s to the 1950s, small brick and wood-frame houses were built to house employees at all levels. Generations of families were born, lived and worked on Dix Hill, fostering a deep connection to the hospital, its grounds, and its legacy.
A Place of Peace
As many hospitals do today, Dorothea Dix Hospital had a nondenominational chapel for use by patients, staff, and visitors. In 1954, the hospital commissioned Salisbury, NC architect John Erwin Ramsay to design and build a new chapel – All Faiths Chapel, which was dedicated in 1956 for the hospital’s centennial. The chapel held worship services, weddings, funerals and other gatherings for patients and staff. It was a place of peace and comfort for many who worked and lived on Dix Hill.
Using private donations, Dix Park Conservancy began renovations of the All Faiths Chapel in 2020. The chapel is now named in honor of Gregory Poole Jr., who tirelessly advocated that the state hospital site be preserved as a public park. Today the Greg Poole, Jr. All Faiths Chapel is a welcoming center and community gathering space.
Dix Hospital Cemetery
A Final Resting Place
Before the mid-20th century, cemeteries were often part of institutional settings such as prisons, workhouses, poor farms, and public hospitals. When a patient died at a state mental hospital, the body was usually returned to the family for interment. However, the stigma of mental illness sometimes led families not to claim their relatives who passed at the hospital. For those patients and others with no family or means for burial, this hospital’s cemetery became their final resting place.
The cemetery’s three acres include more than 900 graves. Little is known about many people buried here, but those interred include Civil War veterans like Eli Hill (d. 1877), a Union soldier with the United States Colored Troops who was once enslaved, and Native Americans from the Lumbee tribe from southeastern North Carolina.
Restoring Dignity to the Dead
Over the years, the hospital cemetery fell into disrepair due to neglect, erosion and the impact from an adjacent landfill. After the landfill closed in 1972, hospital administrators secured grant funds to clean up the cemetery, build a fence and plant trees around its border.
In 1991, local volunteers led by hospital administrators identified 750 patients buried in the cemetery and installed new markers with their names and dates of death and created a memorial wall. Recent research has identified an additional 46 patients buried in unmarked graves. Today, the City of Raleigh maintains the cemetery and plans a full restoration and commemoration of those buried here.
Closing of Dorothea Dix Hospital
The End of an Era
At the height of its operations in 1974, Dorothea Dix Hospital served over 2,500 patients. Over the next two decades, with new drug therapies and the national trend away from institutionalization, patient populations declined. Parts of the property were allocated to other state agencies including North Carolina State University and the Department of Agriculture.
In April 2000, amid a national push to privatize mental health services, a report to the NC General Assembly recommended that the State hospital close and most of its patients be served in the communities where they lived. Some mental health advocates and state officials urged that the hospital be renovated instead.
In 2003, the Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services Legislative Oversight Committee of the General Assembly recommended that Dix Hospital close. The NC Council of State voted in April 2012 to transfer the remaining patients to other facilities, including a new hospital in Butner, and to authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to close the hospital. The quality and availability of community-based patient services varied widely then and today, leading to ongoing debates about how to best provide care for those living with mental illness.
A Legacy of Health and Wellness
After the hospital closed, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services adapted many buildings for use as administrative offices. The City of Raleigh bought the property in 2015, but DHHS retains a lease on most of the buildings and parking lots until 2025. Healing Transitions also remains on the Dix property today.
As a park, this land will continue to serve as a place of healing and wellness. Through connections with nature, opportunities for activity and play, and space for respite and reflection, Dix Park will enhance our community’s mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.
Becoming a Park
The Creation of America’s Next Great Park
In 2015, the City of Raleigh purchased the remaining 308 acres of the Dorothea Dix Hospital campus from the State of North Carolina with the purpose of creating a world-class park. Dix Park represents an extraordinary opportunity for our community. The chance to create a new public space this size in the center of a city is remarkable—and simply unparalleled in the United States today. This is especially true for land of such rich legacy, beauty and potential with its gentle hills and valleys, shaded groves and open fields, historic buildings and grand approaches, skyline views and majestic oaks. The creation of Dorothea Dix Park offers the opportunity to honor the site’s history and celebrate the land as a place for wellness, relaxation, arts, civic participation and natural discovery for all.
Public-Private Partnership
The most important parks and public spaces in America rely on public-private partnerships to make them vibrant and successful. The effort to create Dorothea Dix Park is a public-private partnership between the City of Raleigh and Dix Park Conservancy. The City of Raleigh owns and operates Dorothea Dix Park. The Conservancy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that exists to support the City in its efforts and to serve as its philanthropic and community partner. Working together, the City and the Conservancy can ensure the creation and long-term success of Dorothea Dix Park.