I didn't necessarily appreciate my unique childhood at the time it was occurring. I grew up on the grounds of a state mental hospital in North Carolina. My father was a doctor there and all the employees had to live on the grounds. The hospital was built in the 1890's specifically for treatment of black people in the segregated south. North Carolina agreed to build the hospital but stated that it had to be self-supporting. Therefore, it was a big farm operation which garnered income from the sale of chickens and eggs. Crops were grown in the fields, milk obtained from dairy cows, beef gotten from cattle. We had our own sheriff, a generator, a water treatment plant, a bakery. The hospital was almost a self-contained community. There was a staff house for medical interns and residents and a dorm for nursing students doing a psychiatric rotation.
There was a bit of a caste system to the housing. The doctors all had brick homes. The best house actually went to the business manager - a southern two-story house with a white-columned porch - and the superintendent had one very similar. Other employees, such as social workers, had frame homes with basements. Aides and orderlies lived in frame duplex houses set on cinder blocks.
Labor for the farm operation was provided by the patients. They worked in the corn fields, herded the cows, slaughtered the pigs, collected the eggs and baled the hay. They also cut the grass and painted the houses of the employees, all under the watchful supervision of the white employees. Some of them worked in the homes of employees as maids, helping housewives fix meals and do laundry. Employees could be deputized by the sheriff if need be, such as in a case of escape from the building for the criminally insane.
There were many children there in the 50's. We had ball teams and played many games of kick-the-can. We swam in the river and built forts in the woods. We fished with bamboo poles baited with Ivory soap. We roller skated and biked. We were outdoors most all summer, in bare feet.
Things began changing in the mid-60's, first with desegregation and later with increased rights for those with mental illness. Those big old state hospitals have largely been emptied out. The houses are gone now. There are no more herds of cows or fields of corn.