Caro's state hospital began as a farm colony for epilepsy

In 1914 the State of Michigan opened a place outside Caro for people with a condition that scared most of the country into hiding it: epilepsy. It was called the Caro Farm Colony for Epileptics, and the word “farm” was literal. It worked the land. Patients tended crops and livestock and grew much of what they ate, on a self-sufficient campus that doubled as a hospital. For decades it was the only residential center the state ran for Michiganders with seizure disorders — they came here from everywhere, because there was nowhere else.

That mission ran a remarkably long time. The colony stayed Michigan’s home for epilepsy care until 1997. By then medicine had changed; new drugs let most people with epilepsy manage their seizures and live ordinary lives, and the need for a whole colony faded. The place didn’t close. It became the Caro Center, a state psychiatric hospital, caring for adults with serious mental illness drawn from dozens of counties — one of the institutions Michigan keeps for people who need long-term inpatient care.

The original buildings, put up in 1913, finally wore out. After years of debate over whether to rebuild in Caro at all — the town fought hard to keep it, since the hospital is one of the county’s biggest employers — the state built a new $85 million psychiatric hospital on the site. Officials gathered for an open house in June 2023 to mark its completion, more than a century after the first patients arrived to plant the first fields.

It’s a quiet kind of landmark, the sort you don’t tour. But it’s worth knowing that a working farm for people with epilepsy stood in the Thumb when much of America still treated the condition as something shameful — and that the state never let the place go dark, just kept changing what it was for.