Carville Historic District

The Carville Historic District is a 60-acre campus of buildings and grounds in the farmland town of Carville, Louisiana. It once housed US Public Health Hospital No. 66, later known as the Gillis W. Long Hansen’s Disease Center. Patients with leprosy, now called Hansen’s disease, were forcibly taken to Carville to live in isolation. For more than a century, Carville was the only national leprosarium in the continental United States. The museum on the former hospital grounds showcases artifacts to educate the public about the disease. The museum and cemetery are some of the final reminders of one of history’s most famous quarantined communities.

Background

In the early nineteenth century, cabins for enslaved persons flanked the Indian Camp home on a large farm in Iberville Parish. Indian Camp was the last grand home famed architect Henry Howard designed before the American Civil War. Those cabins remained on site into the next century and became the original homes for Carville’s first Hansen’s disease patients. They were transported there after Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen discovered the mycobacterium leprae in 1873, setting off panic and prompting forced quarantines in response to the disease.

Hansen determined the disease could be communicable, though decades would pass before doctors would realize approximately 95 percent of the population is naturally immune to the bacteria. Hansen’s discovery, nonetheless, revived stigma of the disease. People were fearful because the disease often causes disfiguration and those affected were often discriminated against and shunned by society. An exposé in The Daily Picayune newspaper caused an outcry in New Orleans and led to public demands that leprosy patients be moved out of the city limits.

Robert Camp had relied on enslaved persons to produce his profitable crops before the Civil War. After the war, when he had to pay workers, he went deeply into debt. Indian Camp deteriorated and in 1874 the bank seized the home and leased it out annually as a tenant farm. A modest rice crop was produced until 1891, when the site was abandoned completely. In 1894, the bank began to rent the property to the state of Louisiana to use as a leprosarium.

The first patients were five men and two women from New Orleans. They were forced onto a barge at gunpoint in the night and transported upriver to Indian Camp. The inmates, as the state called them, were required by law to live at Indian Camp, which was named the Louisiana Leper Home. Some were taken in shackles and never returned home.

Physician Isadore Dyer was among those influential in setting up a control board for the Louisiana Leper Home as “a place of refuge, not reproach; a place of treatment and research, not detention.” He also brought in the Daughters of Charity nuns as nurses. The first four nuns arrived in 1896 and went to work restoring the plantation home before beginning to care for patients. When the state bought the site in 1906, the nuns undertook an extensive building plan that would allow them to better care for an increasing number of patients. In 1917, the US government passed legislation to officially designate Carville as a national leprosarium. The federal government purchased Carville at the end of World War I in 1920 for $35,000, and the US Public Health Service took operational control the following year. It became the US Marine Hospital Number 66, National Leprosarium of the United States.

Overview

Between World Wars, new laboratory and infirmary areas were built at Carville, and patients also could build their own homes in a cottage city. In 1931, Stanley Stein, a resourceful patient using a pseudonym, edited and published The Star, a patient-written newspaper mailed to readers across the world to offer a glimpse into Carville and educate the public on Hansen’s disease. Similarly enterprising patients operated within Carville a hair salon, photography studio, carpentry shop, laundromat, restaurants, and other small businesses.

During World War II, approximately 450 dormitory rooms were constructed, as were additional medical facilities that produced specialized orthotic shoes and artificial limbs. In the early 1940s, Carville was a self-sustaining community with the feel of a resort. It contained a seventy-bed infirmary, power plant, church, theater, golf course, and ballroom. Patients gambled, fished in a man-made lake, and participated in the annual Mardi Gras parade. They had top-notch, free care while researchers worked in earnest to end the worldwide public health problem. However, the Carville experience had a dark side. The patients were sent to the facility against their will and given new names so as not to bring shame upon their families. Furthermore, they were not permitted to leave the premises.

Medical science continued to make progress on treating the disease. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the focus was on arresting the disease, which meant the chance of Hanson’s Disease becoming reactivated was small and a person presented little likelihood of infecting others. By 1922, a patient could be medically recommended for release from Carville if their visible skin lesions showed improvement and twelve consecutive monthly skin scrapings tested negative for the bacillus.

In 1941 Dr. Guy Henry Faget, the chief medical officer at Carville, investigated the antibiotic properties of sulfone drugs using twenty-two test patients. By 1947, patients were allowed to leave after only six consecutive months of negative skin tests. A multi-drug therapy was developed in the 1970s and by the 1980s, Hansen’s disease officially required only outpatient treatment.

Throughout the late twentieth century, Carville continued to care for patients, albeit fewer and fewer. Many patients who had spent their lives there opted to stay, and some former patients chose to retire at the facility. Some patients returned when the disease reactivated. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, the Bureau of Prisons housed non-violent offenders, living alongside Hansen’s disease survivors, at Carville.

In recognition of the extraordinary history of the leprosarium, the National Park Service placed the Carville Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. The National Hansen’s Disease Museum was founded in 1996. Visitors can tour more than 4,000 square feet (371 sq m) of exhibition space and view artifacts such as Mardi Gras parade floats, medical equipment, and a vast collection of first-hand accounts of life on site. A guided driving tour of the buildings, which includes a narration from the museum curator, concludes at the cemetery. Because of strict US sanitary codes governing the transport of deceased Hansen’s disease patients, many patients were buried on the grounds while the hospital was open. Many former patients have continued to be interred there in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

“Carville (USA).” International Leprosy Association – History of Leprosy, leprosyhistory.org/geographical‗region/site/site-of-importance-carville. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.

Christiansen, Kristy. “The Story of Leprosy and the National Hansen’s Disease Museum.” Louisiana Travel, www.louisianatravel.com/articles/story-leprosy-and-national-hansens-disease-museum. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.

Gaudlip, Ashley. “Revisiting Louisiana’s Medical Legacy: The National Leprosarium in Carville.” Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, 1 May 2020, prcno.org/revisiting-louisianas-medical-legacy-national-leprosarium-carville/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2023.

“History of the National Hansen’s Disease (Leprosy) Program.” Health Resources & Services Administration, July 2018, www.hrsa.gov/hansens-disease/history. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.

López, Raúl Necochea. “Arresting Leprosy: Therapeutic Outcomes Besides Cure.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 108, no. 2, 2018, pp. 196–202. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.304177. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

Schexnyder, Elizabeth. “Infirmary, National Leprosarium, Carville, Louisiana.” New Orleans Historical, 20 Apr. 2023, neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/770. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.