Anne Arundel County has been awarded $4.6 million in federal funding to support redevelopment efforts at the historic Crownsville Hospital site, a former psychiatric facility known for the mistreatment and neglect of Black patients.

Senators Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin, alongside Rep. John Sarbanes, presented County Executive Steuart Pittman with the check at a press conference Tuesday morning.

The funds will be used to preserve records and artifacts and collect oral histories from the old Crownsville Hospital. It will also help demolish dilapidated buildings to prepare for a public park and create a trail system within the Chesapeake Heritage Area, enhancing access to historical sites across the county while offering more outdoor recreation opportunities for residents.

The Chesapeake Heritage Area is a designated region in Maryland that focuses on preserving and promoting the unique historical, cultural and natural resources of the Chesapeake Bay area.

“It is really important that we tell those stories, not only to memorialize the past but because we all know the fight for justice continues today, the fight against racism, the fight to make sure that people who have mental illness or have other disabilities are treated with dignity,” Van Hollen said during the press conference.

This funding is intended to repurpose the site into a community resource, representing both a major investment in local revitalization and an effort to address the injustices of the past.

The psychiatric hospital, which opened in 1911 as the Maryland Hospital for the Negro Insane, was desegregated in 1963 and closed in 2004. Patients experienced neglect, unsanitary conditions, inadequate food and frequent occurrences of violence, according to “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” a book by NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton that came out earlier this year.

“I congratulate the county executive for his vision, for his commitment to the past and to the future. One of the challenges we have in America is that we don’t teach history the way we should and learn from history,” Cardin said during the press conference. “County Executive Pittman understands that this county has a proud past, but it has a past that needs to be told in its entirety.”

The Maryland chapter of the American Descendants of Slavery Advocacy Foundation, whose members have continuously showed up at Crownsville Committee hearings to share their history and hopes for the former hospital site, said it appreciates the efforts to “illuminate the wrongs that were inflicted on” the patients and caretakers at the hospital.

“These types of local acknowledgements and endeavors, throughout our nation, can be building blocks to the overdue, national redress for American Descendants of Slavery,” the group said in a statement Friday.

In 2021, Pittman convinced the state to turn over the 544-acre site to the county to be used as a park and nonprofit center. Since then, the Crownsville Advisory Committee has been working with the public on plans for the site.

Pittman thanked government at all levels. He said the County Council said yes to doing what previous executives and councils refused to do, “which was acquire these 500 acres from the state and take on this huge project.”

Pittman has been working on revitalizing Crownsville for a few years now.

During his Dec. 5, 2022, inauguration speech, Pittman said: “Today, in this place, we launch Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park, and its campus for the community-based nonprofit organizations that so effectively deliver behavioral health services, food assistance, job training, and anything and everything that promotes the social determinants of good health.”

The site now houses groups such as the Anne Arundel County Food Bank; Gaudenzia, a substance use and co-occurring disorders treatment program; and Hope House, a nonprofit dual diagnosis treatment center.