The abandoned Western State Hospital, c. 2004, since renovated into the Blackburn Inn. Image: Kipp Teague
Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons.
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
Elizabeth Catte
When Elizabeth Catte began researching
Pure America, her new book about the history of eugenics in Virginia, her first act seemed, on its surface, like a non sequitur: she spent a night at a new luxury hotel, the Blackburn Inn, in her hometown of Staunton, Virginia. What interested Catte was that, in its former life, the building that now houses the Blackburn Inn had been the Western State Hospital or, as it was better known upon first opening in 1828, the Western State Lunatic Asylum. It was where many Virginians deemed “feeble-minded” were incarcerated under the directorsh