Love in the Ypsilanti Tuberculosis Sanitarium

It seems an unlikely setting for romance--a huge halfway house for recovering consumptives. Yet Bertha Wiederhoft's daughter Rosena met her intended here, whom she later married.

The Ypsilanti After Cure sanitarium, a branch of a big Detroit tuberculosis sanitarium, sat four miles outside the city on Geddes Road. Local historian James Mann recalls seeing it. "I would be driving to Detroit with my father, and there was that big white building we'd always pass."

Inside its walls, consumptives had a chance to rest and help with the hospital's farms, one of 80 and one of 190 acres. Fresh air and healthy exercise were thought to be beneficial to recovery, and residents planted vegetables, tended chickens, and helped make the hospital-farm self-sufficient. Meals included delicious fresh beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetables tended by the patients and often picked the same day.

Built in 1927, the facility was intended not as a hospital to cure tuberculosis but as an after-cure facility, where patients who'd already undergone more aggressive medical intervention could rest and recover before rejoining the world. The hospital had a capacity of just over 100, and 2,386 patients were treated over its lifetime.

It's likely that of that number, not everyone recovered, but succumbed to the disease. And certainly every patient there knew of tuberculosis's deadliness--for years it was the leading killer in Washtenaw County. Yet against this grim backdrop, Rosena and a male patient, Thomas Green, found each other and later built a life together.

The facility closed May 7, 1954, as improved public health reduced the specter of TB. The remaining patients were sent to other institutions and the farmland was put up for sale. After 27 years, the "San" was, thankfully, no longer needed. Rosena went on to have a daughter, Diane, and died in 1998 after a life spanning almost all of the 20th century.

In its clean, fresh environment, the San had not only restored Rosena's life, but given her the opportunity to join it with another.