The Rosewood Center is an abandoned facility for people with developmental disabilities located on Rosewood Lane in Owings Mills, Maryland. Parts of this place have been closed for decades and rest of it closed in 2009. Large part of the Rosewood Center burned down several years ago, and either they’re still removing debris from it or they’re beginning to tear down the buildings.
The Rosewood Center was founded in 1888. In the first years of Rosewood, children between the age of 7 and 17 were admitted. They taught boys to farm, gardening and carpentry and the girls were taught sewing, laundry, and milking cows. They claimed that the asylum was self supporting and most of the work was done by patients. From 1911 to 1933, 166 patients were sold off to rich families to become unpaid servants, this was a big scandal, that was only uncovered recently.
By 1968 the school had 2,700 patients and started to get overcrowded. Originally Rosewood was mean’t to be a school and were patients were taken care of, and helped them with their illness. But in World War 2 Rosewood became a place where they were starting to keep the patients for their whole lives, even if they didn’t need lifelong care, to start to protect society from the patients instead of rehabilitating the patients. Like many asylums, Rosewood had over-crowding and didn’t have enough staff, and lots of newspapers published articles exposing Rosewood, forcing them to rehabilitate the patients and to release patients that didn’t really need life long care.
A doctor from Rosewood in 1952, treated children of polio, and was part of a pioneer program for doctors to make a real vaccine for everyone to receive. In 1956 the hospital became integrated with African American patients which was a big problem at the asylum, because many people didn’t want it to be integrated.
In 1960’s the patient numbers quickly decreased as they started integrating patients into communities. During the 1950’s to the 1970’s there was much malparcting with the doctor, and neglect and abuse from the nurses and care givers, a similar story to other asylums at this time. In 1981 it was discovered that patients at Rosewood didn’t get “minimally adequate care”. It closed in 1989 after further investigation.
The old and new facilities stood directly across a field from each other, the newer facility actively housed over half of the people with developmental disabilities who reside in Maryland’s four state-run institutions. The Rosewood Center main building was burnt in a 2006 case of arson and in March 2009, another of Rosewood’s vacant buildings was destroyed by fire. The building had previously been approved for demolition, so firefighters allowed the building to burn rather than attempt to put it out. The State of Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene closed Rosewood on June 30, 2009.
