Western State Hospital (Boundary Increase II)

This boundary increase adds the steam plant site to the Western State Hospital Historic District in Staunton. The main building, a one-story brick boiler house built around 1949, replaced an 1895-era plant on the same ground. Designed in an Art Deco style by the state's institutional engineering office rather than a named architect, it has stepped-back facades, brick pilasters and large banks of metal casement windows. Four earlier resources remain: a coal trestle from about 1899, a secondary smokestack, a storage building under the trestle, and an ash silo. The plant heated the hospital from 1896 until the site closed in 2002, and it also served the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind. A 1929 fire left the hospital's roughly 2,000 patients without heat in zero-degree weather until emergency steam arrived. The site was listed for its role in health and medicine and as a physical link between two major state institutions. It is now vacant.