Blackburn Inn (former Western State Hospital)

Western State Hospital opened its doors to its first patient in July 1828, making it one of Virginia's oldest public psychiatric institutions. Architect Thomas R. Blackburn designed the main building — he was among the craftsmen who had worked on the recently completed University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson. The hospital occupied an 80-acre campus in Staunton with 22 buildings at its peak.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, the hospital operated on a therapeutic model: gardens, occupational programming, and structured daily life were part of treatment. That model eroded as patient populations grew. By the early twentieth century the facility had shifted toward custody over treatment.

Dr. Joseph DeJarnette served as superintendent from 1906 to 1943. He was an outspoken advocate for eugenics, published poetry praising forced sterilization programs, and publicly admired Nazi Germany's more ambitious eugenic policies. Following the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell — which upheld Virginia's forced sterilization law — DeJarnette oversaw a program that performed at least 1,701 sterilizations at Western State alone. Virginia's program continued until the law's repeal in 1974. The state issued a formal apology in 2002.

The hospital vacated its original campus in the 1970s when operations shifted elsewhere. The complex was converted into the Staunton Correctional Center, a medium-security prison, which operated until 2003. The site sat vacant until developers purchased it in 2006. After a decade-long renovation, the Main Administration Building reopened as the Blackburn Inn & Conference Center in July 2018, earning listing in the Historic Hotels of America registry. A cemetery on the grounds holds over 3,000 patients, many in unmarked graves.