July 14, 2018: Milledgeville, Georgia . . .
Read MoreMy friend from Colorado, Heather, used to live in Milledgeville, Georgia nearly a decade ago when she worked at the military school. Heather was visiting me in Athens this weekend and wanted to take a drive to her old stomping grounds to say hello to her former neighbors. She has kept in touch with them since she left Milledgeville and wanted to visit since she was in the neighborhood, relatively speaking.
This was fine because I'm always up for a road trip. But I also saw this as a great opportunity to take a bike ride in an area where I had never been before. Our plan was for her to have a nice chat with her neighbors whom she hasn't seen in several years while I hit the road for some exercise.Eventually, I found my way to the Vinson Highway, Georgia Route 112, one of the main thoroughfares through town. My plan was to head south away from the downtown area for a few miles, and then turn around.
The Vinson Highway took me past a few Milledgeville landmarks, the largest of which is the former Central State Hospital (CHS), once the largest mental asylum in the world. The center opened in 1842 as the "Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum," and was in continuous operation until 2010 when it stopped accepting new patients.
At one time, CHS, or "Milledgeville" as it was colloquially known, housed almost 13,000 patients in 200 buildings on 2,000 acres. CHS still exists today in a modified and greatly scaled down capacity. Much of the complex has been re-purposed. Some of it is also abandoned.