Anne Arundel County marked a milestone Monday in its redevelopment of the Crownsville Hospital campus, where Maryland once warehoused Black people with mental illness.

Officials unveiled the county’s new Nonprofit Center, a renovated hospital building that will be home to various organizations determined to benefit the greater good.

It’s part of a comprehensive overhaul of the sprawling 500-acre campus that the state sold to the the county for $1 in 2022, nearly two decades after it shuttered the century-old facility where Black patients faced neglect, violence and squalid living conditions.

Developed with input from the surrounding community, the county’s master plan for Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park calls for mental health care facilities, athletic fields, public gardens, a network of trails and a memorial to the approximately 1,700 patients buried in graves marked not with names but numbers.

Describing the hospital as a “notorious institution with a dark history of racism and abuse,” U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said opening a center for nonprofits represents a “special day for all of Maryland, given the history of this place and the transformation that is taking place.”

“It’s the next step in trying to transform that dark period of time into a period of opportunity,” the Maryland Democrat said. “Not to lock people behind closed doors but to open those doors.”

He and U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth credited Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, a fellow Democrat, for making progress on his pledge to revitalize the dilapidated campus and to open it to the community as a place of healing.

“It is complicated. It’s complex,” Elfreth said of the hospital redevelopment project. “It has a history that many people would turn away from instead of confront.”

Maryland opened the Crownsville complex in 1911 on a former tobacco farm as the “Hospital for the Negro Insane.”

In the ensuing years, white doctors at the originally segregated facility performed experimental treatments on Black patients. Over time, it grew overcrowded and patients suffered from inadequate staffing.

Eventually, Black staff were allowed and the hospital was integrated. It is said to have improved beginning in the mid-1960s. But with far fewer patients as treatment strategies evolved, the state opted to close it in 2004, leaving the campus to fall into disrepair.

Two decades later, officials said, a long-awaited transformation is underway.

Already operational on the campus are the Anne Arundel County Food Bank as well as Gaudenzia and Hope House, two providers of treatment for substance abuse and mental health.

Faye Belt, 72, grew up in Crownsville and worked at the hospital. She was always struck by the natural beauty of its grounds.

“May the grounds continue to heal the present and the future, as they did when we were there,” Belt said in an interview. “Everything that they’re going to have, finally, will be a healing place.”

Local historian Janice Hayes-Williams has identified 1,700 people buried at Crownsville Hospital’s cemetery by poring over reams of death certificates. A memorial to their lives entitled “Say My Name” will be unveiled in September.

“I think it’s wonderful it’s open,” Hayes-Williams said of the nonprofit center. “I’m just praying that the master plan doesn’t sit on a shelf.”

Van Hollen, Elfreth and Pittman said it was fitting that nonprofits make new homes there.

In 2023, Congress set aside $3 million and the county chipped in $641,000 to renovate a 1942 building once used for geriatric care and a school into the nonprofit facility, county spokesperson Renesha Alphonso said.

Anne Arundel is home to many “wonderful” nonprofits, Elfreth said, but many lack offices. With more than 13,000 square feet of space, the new Nonprofit Center aims to change that.

“We were incorporated many, many years ago. This will be our first office,” said Fred Delp, executive director of the Anne Arundel County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which seeks to improve the quality of life of people with mental illness and their loved ones.

Delp said he envisions the organization using “wonderful, large conference rooms” for classes and support group sessions.

NAMI Anne Arundel County cut the ribbon on its new offices Monday alongside two other nonprofits: Sapphire Rise, which provides STEM education to youth from underrepresented communities, and One Annapolis, which seeks to uplift and empower marginalized children and families.

“We will be housed in a space that actually was the antithesis of everything we hold true and dear to us,” said One Annapolis CEO Ratasha Harley. ”We will be housed in a space that once symbolized separation and oppression and confinement and exclusion for those who looked like us, actually even some of our own family members.

“It is not lost,” Hartley continued, “that we will be housed in a space that once denied Black dignity but that will now amplify Black voices.”