Northampton Veterans Administration Hospital Historic District

Set on a hilltop about three miles northwest of downtown Northampton, this veterans hospital campus opened in 1924 as a neuropsychiatric facility. Construction began in 1922 from designs by the Army Quartermaster Corps Construction Service. The earliest patient ward and treatment buildings, the Main Building and the Mess and Kitchen Building are grouped around an oval drive. Brick exteriors carry restrained Colonial Revival details, and staff duplexes and officer housing along the entrance drive show Dutch Colonial Revival features such as gambrel roofs. Maintenance and utility buildings sit down the slope to the southwest. The grounds once covered roughly 286 acres, where patients worked on farm operations as occupational therapy; the campus has since shrunk to about 105 acres. The district includes 36 contributing resources dating from 1922 to 1950, and it resembles other early-1920s veterans hospitals in Iowa, Michigan and Ohio. The campus remains in use as a medical center.