Fairview, maybe?

Thanks to a mild corporate mishap (or mischief), I had a free rental car this weekend. I blasted off to my favorite cigar bar in SE Portland Friday evening, did some people watching, stuffed a tasty burger down my neck, burned a nice 10 year old cigar, and plotted evil.

The next morning, I woke up at stupid o’clock in the morning and decided I was going to enact revenge on the corporate overlords by using said rental to drive south and checking out the ruins of the Fairview Training Center (FTC). FTC was Oregon’s state hospital for mentally ill people for about one hundred years, and is/was every bad thing that comes to mind when you picture mental health care in the US from EVER until the move(s) to community based care in the mid 1908s. If it’s backward, inhumane, neglectful, or just plain horrible and occurred in and asylums built in the late 1800s/early 1900s, it likely happened at FTC.

I have always wanted to check this place out, and recently learned that the entire site (the size of a small college!) had been sold off to a developer in 2000. During the research that yielded that tidbit, I also learned that demolition of the smaller housing units (FTC Called them “cottages”) and other outbuildings was recently finished…so I wandered google earth a bit while I was at the cigar bar last night.

So after rising at an unholy hours this morning, I hopped in the car and sped through dawn’s early light toward Salem. After securing something that barely qualifies as food for a mobile breakfast, I drove the road the handful of remaining buildings are supposed to be on and……..nothing. Demolition had indeed been completed, with work on new housing and other developments proceeding earnestly. Beige condos were spreading like a stain on the land, and I was in no mood for…..new construction. As I prepared to leave, something on a hillside down the road caught my eye. Shrouded in 100 year old trees what did I spy, but buildings!

Given that my rental was a BRILLIANT orange Dodge Challenger, I decided against parking right in the open driveway and walking up to the facility whistlin’ dixie or humming my favorite nickleback tune. I drove about 1/2 mile down the road, pulled into an office complex parking lot, and secreted the corporate avenger among a handful of other cars (presumably belonging to those poor souls working for the weekend). I got my camera bag out, checked my gear, and headed back up the road and for an access trail I had seen heading up the hill and into the trees at the edge of the site.

After I crested the hill, I saw the remains of another facility spread out before me

I spent a few minutes hunkered down under that huge tree to the right, just to be certain that I wasn’t going to walk into any imperial entanglements with bored secur-i-goons or homeless people annoyed at curious wandering souls. After making sure I was alone, I ventured on…

The complex–which I later learned was the former Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility–splayed out before me, enclosed in a massive chain link fence. Unsurprisingly, the fence was quite secure, and yielded no access points or easy breaches even after 2 trips around the entirety of it. Denied access to the heart of where I wanted to be, I settled for viewing how nature is slowly reclaiming the land.

Curiously, some of the buildings still had power, including the unit pictured above, that is still running HVAC. I understand that the Oregon Youth Authority (among a few other state departments) had operated Hillcrest from the late 1890s until 2017. Exploring a 100+ year old correctional facility just added to the surreal feeling of wandering a now abandoned place that formerly teemed with life.

While parts of the facility were still in serviceable condition, the area I wandered had obviously not been touched for some time. I wasn’t sure what to expect coming over the hill on that trail, given the dark history of the Fairview site, correctional institutions, and of psychiatric care in the US (especially that in the early to mid 20th century). Owing to this and to their not wholly inaccurate portrayal in some great (and horrifying) movies, I did not expect to find…….peace and tranquility?

But there I was, walking around a piece of the decidedly dark history from the golden age of cruel jails and scary asylums, appreciating trees, flowers, and wildlife, and gobbling plump, sweet Oregon blackberries fresh off the vine.

I was also contemplating ways to get in the perimeter… All the power was off to the maglock’d vehicle and reception gates just behind the Administration building, but their lock cylinders were gone. Simple chains with padlocks held many of the gates I had encountered shut! Since I was ill equipped for any adventures that the Legal Department would require I redact, I had to settle for peering through the fences and longing…..to break INTO a fancy jail?

In the process of leaving, I passed a clearing and spied a water tower adjacent to a portion of the FTC site undergoing construction (and stained by those Beige condos I mentioned).

After some quick google fu, and an encounter with some other explorers, I learned that this area was once home to half a dozen of the “cottages”. Another segment of this area held the old laundry facility and power house–the only 4 remnants of so much history, and likely so much pain:

Here again, serene nature is taking over land that has seen so much tumult, replete with vegetation retaking foundations and wildlife milling about unmolested.

Once again, so much beauty and peace on land that has seen…..so much. This all reminded me of something my grams asked me while we discussed my weird hobbies before she died. Read about that right here and enjoy some more history lost. I’ll be back here soon, so stay tuned before it’s all gone.