The Traverse City State Hospital, familiar to many Up North as the Northern Michigan Asylum, started taking patients in 1885.

The building was designed — patients and their families might have learned — as an "attempt at creating a space to facilitate the return to sanity," according to kirkbridebuildings.com.

"This was a very modern building in 1885 when it opened," said Vanessa Vance, who gives tours of the former hospital, which closed in 1989. "It had a very sophisticated ventilation system that involved tunnels that go underneath the building.

The system pumped fresh air through the building. Health care experts believed "a lot of diseases of the day, including insanity, were caused by bad air," Vance said.

It served 39 counties and was one of three state facilities built in the l

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