Weston State Hospital

Weston State Hospital
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
The Hospital's main building in 2006
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Location	Asylum Drive, Weston, West Virginia
Coordinates	39°02′19″N 80°28′17″W / 39.03861°N 80.47139°W / 39.03861; -80.47139Coordinates: 39°02′19″N 80°28′17″W / 39.03861°N 80.47139°W / 39.03861; -80.47139
Area	26.5 acres (10.7 ha)
Built	Constructed 1858-1881. Opened to patients 1864.
Architect	Richard Snowden Andrews
Architectural style	Gothic Revival Tudor Revival Kirkbride Plan
NRHP Reference #	78002805
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	April 19, 1978
Designated NHL	June 21, 1990<Abbyame="nhlsum">"Weston Hospital Main Building". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Archived from the original on 2008-03-28. </ref>

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, subsequently the Weston State Hospital, was a Kirkbridepsychiatric hospital that operated from 1864 until 1994 by the government of the U.S. state of West Virginia, in the city of Weston.

Built by architect Richard Andrews, it was constructed from 1858-1881. Originally designed to hold 250 people, it became overcrowded in the 1950s with 2,400 patients. It was forcibly closed in 1994 due to changes in treatments of patients. The hospital was bought by Joe Jordan in 2007, and is opened for tours and other money raising events for its restoration. The hospital's main building is claimed to be one of the largest hand-cut stone masonry buildings in the United States, and the second largest hand-cut sandstone building in the World, with the only bigger one being in the Moscow Kremlin. As Weston Hospital Main Building, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

The hospital was authorized by the Virginia General Assembly in the early 1850s as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Following consultations with Thomas Story Kirkbride, then-superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, a building in the Kirkbride Plan was designed in the Gothic Revival and Tudor Revival styles by Richard Snowden Andrews (1830–1903), an architect from Baltimore whose other commissions included the Maryland Governor's residence in Annapolis and the south wing of the U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Construction on the site, along the West Fork River opposite downtown Weston, began in late 1858. Work was initially conducted by prison laborers; a local newspaper in November of that year noted "seven convict negroes" as the first arrivals for work on the project. Skilled stonemasons were later brought in from Germany and Ireland.