For patients at the Traverse City State Hospital, back when it was in operation, working on the facility’s farm was a part of the "beauty is therapy" model of mental health treatment up until the late 1950s.
Barn 206, now part of the Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park in Traverse City, was once a cow barn run by hospital patients and staff.
“A lot of the [cow] grazing was where Meijer is [now], West Middle School, all the way out to Division Street. So the lawn and pines… full of cows,” said Matt Cowall, director of the regional recreational authority, which manages the land the barn sits on.
Its old hayloft reopened this week as an educational center and event space.
And as an unexpected treat in the newly opened space, a small message from the past is now on public display for the first time since the building closed.
On one of the beams holding up the high wooden ceilings, there’s a message scrawled in pencil, protected by a piece of plexiglass.
“Someone threw a coat of white paint on this bare wood beam, and in pencil, left an ode to their day here working in the loft level,” said Cowall.
Some of the words are hard to make out.
“Cecil Morrison," Cowall read aloud. "Put hay in this damned barn. July 3, 1957. It did rain. Looked rainy. No pay until nite. Everything at this place going to hell since Al Long took over.”
The Botanic Garden staff believe the summer of 1957 would have been the last season that the farm was operational. It shut down that winter.
The message continues: “Also put hay in here July 12, so the brown-nosers could go to the parade.”
In 1957, July 12 was the last day of the Cherry Festival.
They don't know very much about Cecil Morrison, nor who Al Long was. But according to the Botanic Garden's executive director Matthew Ross, in the days after the note was unveiled, a couple dropped by with a clue.
"They heard about the note... [the husband] was the neighbor of Cecil Morrison. Cecil was a worker at the hospital," Ross wrote in an email to IPR.
The old barn is now called the Debra J. Edson Family Education Center. It has a kitchen and it’s available for classes, catered events, and receptions.
The Botanic Garden is free to visit, and makes an increasing portion of its money from event rentals.
The message on the wooden beam is far from the only sign of the building’s history. The first floor of Barn 206 is still mostly untouched.
Cowall walked through the old cow milking stalls on the lower level.
“As you get down the row here, you can start to see, you know, that cow would kind of put their head in, have a little snack,” he said, walking through the stalls, which remain as they were in the 1950s.
They haven’t found the money to open this part to the public yet. And Cowall says there was no reason for anyone to clean all this up when the farm shut down, now almost 70 years ago.
“The way I've always thought of it is, it'd be like the end of any other job, right? You're no longer employed, so you walked away too. They locked the door behind you on the last day, and here everything sat.”
That is, until groups like his find the time and the money to unlock the doors.
