Eloise -- the poorhouse that became an asylum

By Mary Bailey / The Detroit News

For generations of metro-area Detroiters, Eloise Hospital stood at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Merriman Road as a chilling reminder of what could happen to you if your life took a bad turn. For years it was viewed as a destination of no return for the insane, the tubercular, and the just plain poor.

Once one of the largest and best mental health hospitals in the country with more than 8,000 patients, Eloise, later Wayne County General, was closed in 1981 after years of financial probems and mental health reforms.

The gated entrance to the Eloise facility in 1940.

In 1839, only two years after Michigan had joined the Union, Wayne County paid $800 to buy a 160-acre farm in Nankin Township (now Westland). The purchase included a log cabin known as the Black Horse Tavern. The County erected an addition to the tavern building and used it to house 35 needy people, a keeper and his wife. They called it the Wayne County Poorhouse.

Its first residents were transferred from another poorhouse at Gratiot and Mt. Elliott in Detroit . Many refused to move, claiming the new poorhouse was "too far out in the wilderness." And they were right -- at that time the corner of Michigan and Merriman was nearly two days by stage coach from Detroit.

But that was what the county officials had in mind. They wanted somewhere well out of sight to send what they saw as society's dregs -- the vagrants, vagabonds, drunkards, pilferers and brawlers. With such a broad charter, it wasn't long before the feeble-minded and the insane were being housed there.