Letter of Intent: Preserving the Memory of Pennhurst

The Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance seeks to create a museum and interpretive center to educate visitors from around the world on the history of intellectual and developmental disability with a special focus on that history’s place at Pennhurst. We plan to both restore the former Superintendent’s mansion to a safe and accessible condition capable of containing these exhibits and lodging visitors, and to create educational programming for all visitors including lecture and presentation series. This provides a great opportunity to educate visitors on the Pennhurst’s role within American disability history, but it also comes with a need: the need to preserve this historic house.

Per the PMPA’s six-year plan, prior to creating this content, the PMPA needed to rehabilitate the building that would house it. This rehabilitation is largely complete now, but maintenance of the building remains a priority, as well as potentially funding any possible opportunity to keep the ruins of the former Pennhurst campus in a state of stabilized decay. Preserving the mansion in conjunction with developing content for seven exhibits interpreting Pennhurst’s history and the larger history of disability in America creates a need that this award can help abate.

A photograph of the former Superintendent's mansion on the Pennhurst property.

The Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance proposed a six-year plan in 2015 for the renovation of the former Superintendent’s mansion and its repurposing as a museum and interpretive center. The mansion is a three-story building. The plan for the first two years focused on renovating and preparing the mansion for the exhibits to follow. Nevertheless, the mansion was built in the early twentieth century, and therefore funds for additional maintenance are required.

Regarding the plan for exhibits within the mansion, three rooms on the first floor will be used as follows: The first two rooms will hold the PMPA traveling exhibit, while room three shows historical videos including seating for lectures and presentations. Examples of these include Somebody Touched Me (1965), Suffer the Little Children (1968), With a Voice Comes Understanding (1997), A Call of Conscience (2010), and Individual Lives.

The four rooms on the second floor would be used to explain the social forces surrounding Pennhurst’s creation, decay, and closure using artifacts with labels. These exhibits will describe how the eugenics movement inspired places like Pennhurst, the role of underfunding and overcrowding in creating inhuman conditions society no longer could overlook, how the media, families of residents, and courts awakened society to the need for change, and finally how the court found Pennhurst and places like it were inherently unconstitutional in the 1980s. The general narrative will address how the legacy of Pennhurst is not misery, but rather that this is where the nation and the world first learned that "there is a better way" to support citizens who have intellectual and developmental disabilities. The impacts on national and international policy will be described as "still unfolding."

Additionally, the rooms of the third floor need to be refurbished so that they can be reserved for overnight stays by visiting scholars, lecturers, staff and possibly paying visitors who are touring the full historic campus that is owned by a private group. This especially separates the Pennhurst Museum and Interpretive Center from many other historic house museums, as it provides possible lodging for some visitors.

An aerial photograph of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital campus from 1922.

The Pennhurst Museum and Interpretive Center will be one of, if not the first, historic house museums to exclusively focus on the history of intellectual and developmental disability in the United States through interactive programming, exhibits, lectures, and film all within the original environment of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital’s former Superintendent’s mansion. Additionally, whereas the only opportunity for visitors to experience the Pennhurst property until now has been through trespassing or the Pennhurst Asylum Halloween event which grossly misrepresents the institution's history and the stories of its former residents, this museum and interpretive center provides the first opportunity for many to visit the property both legally and to learn the real story behind and surrounding Pennhurst.

This project began in 2015 and is estimated to be completed in 2021, completion being defined as the completed restoration and creation of interpretive and exhibit materials on all levels of the house. The requested money will not fund this project’s creation, but will support its continuation and ability to stay on schedule.

The campus itself is crumbling, and in time, only the former Superintendent’s mansion and a few salvageable buildings will remain. The time to create this interpretive center and museum to teach the masses about Pennhurst’s history and its role in disability history is now, while the environment around the mansion still provide additional physical reminders of what the campus was like when it operated.

There is a significant deficit in educational programming surrounding the history intellectual and developmental disability. As such this project provides vast opportunities for partnership with schools, educational organizations, and other museums throughout the state. This project is spurred on by the creation of the Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance’s founding in 2009, which itself was precipitated by the longer history of disability rights advocacy which itself largely originated with and continues to be led by Pennhurst alumni. The time for this project is now, so that their voices can contribute to this museum and interpretive center and further explain why we can “never go back.”

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For additional resources on the important work being done by the Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance, please visit their website: http://www.preservepennhurst.org/