Maybury State Park: the woods that were once a city for the sick

The paved trails winding through Maybury were once the streets of a small, sealed-off town built for people who were dying of tuberculosis. Before there were antibiotics, the only treatment doctors had for TB was rest, clean air, and sunshine — so Detroit went looking for farmland far from the city’s smoke. In the late 1910s the city bought up a cluster of farms out in Northville Township and, around 1921, opened the Detroit Municipal Tuberculosis Sanatorium.

It wasn’t a single hospital so much as a community. At its peak the grounds held roughly 40 buildings — wards, a power plant, staff housing — and it grew much of its own food on the working Maybury Farm. Patients spent months, sometimes years, resting on open porches in the country air. In 1927 the place was renamed for William H. Maybury, the Detroit official who had pushed it into being.

By the late 1960s the cure had changed. Drugs could beat tuberculosis at last, the long rest cure was obsolete, and the sanatorium closed in 1969. Most of the buildings came down, and in 1975 the state turned the land into Maybury State Park, more than 900 acres of woods, meadows, fishing pond, and bridle paths.

Walk it now and the history hides in plain sight: many trails follow the old hospital roads, and a couple of the original brick doctors’ houses still stand among the trees. A new Maybury Farm down the road keeps the agricultural thread going. It’s an easy, pretty park — and the quiet that makes it lovely is the same quiet they once prescribed as medicine.