Sunland Hospital: A Community with Disabilities Hidden in Plain Sight

Sunland Hospital Training Center served as a residential facility for individuals with disabilities in Central Florida for over two decades, beginning in 1960. Many of Sunland’s patients were considered to have severe mental and physical disabilities and were wards of the State of Florida. Sunland Orlando was closed in 1985 after a lawsuit alleged abuse and neglect at the facility. Section Q in Greenwood Cemetery is the final resting place for 106 Sunland Hospital patients.  

Colonial American towns in the 1600s had the task of caring for their children with disabilities since their families could not care for them. Both children and adults with mental and physical disabilities were all housed together with homeless paupers and criminals. Defects were believed to result from a family’s ill morals, and thus, those with disabilities were shunned by society and brought shame to their families. By the mid-1800s, states used farms or built asylums to house individuals with mental and physical disabilities, and criminals, where they worked and lived under horrid conditions that worsened as the number of residents increased. Some wealthy families kept their child with a disability at home under hired private care, but if violent, these well-to-do parents relinquished their parental rights to the State and had them institutionalized. Poor families that did not have a private home care option, gave up their parental rights, and had their family members with disabilities committed to state-operated facilities.¹  

In Orlando, the Sunland Hospital Training Center was one of these state facilities, sometimes called “Sunnyland.” The hospital opened in 1960 and was one of a chain of residential healthcare facilities that served individuals with mental and physical disabilities in Florida. Sunland was situated and housed in the former Florida State Sanitarium, a tuberculosis hospital built in 1938 in the Pine Hills neighborhood.² This location was considered the primary branch of the Sunland Hospital chain, serving as the specialized training center in the care of non-ambulatory patients.³          

Like during Colonial America, the early and later eras of the United States continued its prejudices against people born with physical, intellectual, and mental disabilities. When the Spanish colony, “La Florida,” became an American colony in 1821, it entered a culture in which these prejudices treated this community as outcasts, rejected ill-fits, and incarcerated with criminals to remain separate from society. These sentiments continued to exist once Florida gained its statehood in 1845.⁴ In 1915, the State established a commission to study needs for the “indigent, epileptic, and feeble-minded.” In 1921, “The Florida Farm Colony for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic” was founded in Gainesville and marked the first state-funded services for people with disabilities. By the 1950s, Florida had several institutions to serve children and adults with developmental disabilities.⁵ In 1957, the Florida legislature created the Division of Child Training Schools, under which Sunland Training Center was placed.⁶ By 1960, as new antibiotics dissipated tuberculosis, the Florida State Sanitarium in Orlando was converted into a Sunland Training Center.⁷ Florida still did not have a system of support for parents wanting to keep their children at home, and thus, these children with disabilities were now admitted to Sunland to spend the rest of their lives with other patients with issues ranging from birth defects to severe intellectual or mental disabilities. They were now “wards of the state” once their parents gave up parental rights to the State of Florida.⁸ Continued discrimination towards this community, coupled with physicians recommending institutionalization for expert care and to live with others of similar disabilities, led to enlarged patient populations. 

By the 1970s, reports began to surface about the care received by patients in the Orlando Sunland Hospital facility. The public was made aware that the facility was an overcrowded secret haven of physical abuse and torture where patients resided in horrible, inhumane conditions.⁹ The Orlando Sentinel Star investigated claims of neglect and abuse, “examined the routine use of feeding tubes and restraints,” and employees’ complaints of inadequate staffing to care for the large patient population. They cited that “overcrowding was the single most dehumanizing condition observed” and that, most notably, Sunland Orlando used a gastronomy procedure to surgically connect feeding tubes to their stomachs, which was done more at this facility than nationwide.¹⁰ These allegations culminated in a class-action lawsuit in 1979 by the “Association for Retarded Citizens of Florida” (ARC) on behalf of the “Sunland Six,” a group of six patients of Sunland who sought to improve conditions at the facility and bring awareness to the plight of the residents with disabilities in Florida. The lawsuit alleged that Sunland “failed to provide...adequate facilities and services” to the patients at Orlando Sunland.¹¹ 

The lawsuit was successful in closing the hospital, and the state began placing patients in smaller group homes in the community. However, some patients were unable, or even unwilling, to leave the facility and Sunland was allowed to continue to operate minimally until 1985 when the hospital finally closed.¹² The building was abandoned due to the difficulties and costs associated with demolishing the asbestos-filled structure, making it a popular locale for teenagers and young adults to explore.¹³ The vacated facility attracted new attention from visitors, believing rumors that the site was haunted. In 1997, 23-year-old Keith Murdock was exploring the building with friends when he was injured after falling down an elevator shaft.¹⁴ This prompted the State of Florida to finally demolish the former site of Sunland Hospital the following year.¹⁵ Today, a small playground marks the site where so many children with disabilities spent their days within the walls of Sunland Hospital.  

Many former Sunland Hospital patients who died during the early years of the facility’s operation are buried in section Q, including those who may have been institutionalized elsewhere before their residence and subsequent death at Sunland. Over 47% of Sunland patients buried in section Q died before their sixth birthday.¹⁶ Though most patients buried in Greenwood Cemetery are children who did not live into adulthood, many did live long lives. One such patient was Louisa Higgs, who was born in 1912 and died at the age of 78 in 1969 at Sunland Hospital.¹⁷ Most of these ninety-nine individuals have gravesites marked with a flat headstone, such as Baby Boy Bell, who died in 1965 at the age of two years old, never having received a name.¹⁸ A visit to section Q prompts solemn reflection on the past treatment of persons with disabilities and reminds us of how close we are to a time in which valuable members of our community were excluded and hidden away in places like Sunland Hospital. 

1. A. Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America, 2nd ed., (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1949).

2. The End of an Era: ARC/Florida Suit Closes Institution (Arc/Florida: 1982): 1.

3. Kim Curry, “The Sunland Training Centers: Florida’s Institutes for Children with Intellectual Disabilities,” Florida Public Health Review 10, no 6 (2019): 3, accessed March 18, 2024, https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/fphr/vol10/iss1/6 

4. Rebecca Greenfield, “Our First Public Parks: The Forgotten History of Cemeteries,” The Atlantic, March 16, 2011; See Keith Eggener, Cemeteries (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010); National Park Service, "African Burial Ground National Monument". Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (FL: University Press, 1990), 106.

5. The ARC of Florida. “Our History: Our Narrative and Who We are Today,” accessed March 18, 2024, https://www.arcflorida.org/about/our-history 

6. R. C. Philips, Sunland Training Center at Gainesville, Florida (Gainesville: 1959), 4.

7. “Sunland: From hospital to haunted hangout,” Tallahassee Democrat. April 28, 2016, https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2016/04/27/sunland-tallahassee-mental-hospital/83503192/ 

8. Elaine Morgan, “Sunland: It Used to Be a Dumping Ground,” Florida Times Union, July 22, 1984.

9. “Sunland Hospital: Is There No Way Out?” Orlando Sentinel Star, May 6, 1973, 1E; “Undercurrent at Sunland Suggests Hopelessness,” Orlando Sentinel Star, May 9, 1973, Fl.

10. “Sunland Hospital: Is There No Way Out?” Orlando Sentinel Star, May 6, 1973, 1E.

11. “6 Sunland Residents File Suit to Get Facility Closed,” Orlando Sentinel Star, August 23, 1979, C1.; “Sunland Residents File Suit to Get Facility Closed,” Orlando Sentinel Star, August 23, 1979, C1; End of an Era, 1.; Curry, “Sunland Training Centers, 6.

12. “Judge Bans Move of 2 at Sunland,” Orlando Sentinel, June 15, 1983, A1.

13. Jack Recker, Oral History Interview with Isabella Love, Greenwood Cemetery History Harvest, Sanford, Florida, March 15, 2024.

14. “Fall Down Elevator Shaft Hurts One,” Orlando Sentinel, July 29, 1997, C1.

15. “None Will Mourn When Sunland Walls Fall Down,” Orlando Sentinel, August 10, 1998, B1.

16. Erin K. Martin, “Trends in Grave Marker Attributes in Greenwood Cemetery: Orlando, Florida” M.A. Thesis. UCF. 2018 Greenwood Cemetery Markers; Greenwood Cemetery Map: See Sunland Residents in Block Q, https://www.orlando.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/departments/greenwood/greenwood-lot-map.pdf 

17.  Louisa Higgs Burial Record, Greenwood Cemetery Records.

18. 28 Sunland Graves have no marker, 78 do.; Baby Boy Bell Burial Record, Greenwood Cemetery Records.