The hospital was built by the city of St. Louis primarily as a quarantine facility for patients with a variety of easily transmissible diseases, including smallpox, yellow fever, and tuberculosis.

There is a cemetery located on the grounds of this closed hospital, the building founded in 1875 with its last major renovation in 1949 and was demolished in 1989.

Nineteen buildings were constructed by 1939 and an 105-acre (0.42 km2) farm, post office, railroad stop, housing, and recreational facilities made the hospital almost self-sustaining.

By the end of World War II new medications decreased the life-threatening effects of tuberculosis; from the 1950s to 1983 the hospital was used as housing for the indigent elderly.

This Saint Louis County, Missouri state location article is a stub.