In 1926, the Mississippi legislature decided to relocate the state hospital from Jackson, where it was being swallowed by suburban development, to the former Rankin Penal Farm. The Great Depression halted construction midway, but the 70-building complex occupying 350 acres finally opened in March 1935. Overstreet expanded his firm to take on this project, the largest of his career, hiring A. Hays Town, who later became his partner. The buildings follow a Georgian Revival theme of red brick and cast stone detail, best represented by the two-story Administration Building at the front of the complex, with its full-height portico and three-stage cupola. The campus was built on the cottage plan where patients occupied a cottage based on diagnosis, in contrast to the old hospital’s Kirkbride Plan, where patients were housed in one large building for easier oversight.
Muskopf and Irish produced a City Beautiful-inspired landscape for the hospital with its two racially segregated campuses connected by a single road. The east campus, originally for white patients, incorporates a 15-acre lake and a semicircular lawn wrapping curved streets. A similar but smaller scheme was intended for the west campus for African Americans, but instead was organized in a diamond pattern, with buildings outlining quadrangles. The hospital was integrated in 1965. The self-sustaining facility—lauded when it opened as “the state’s most extraordinary city”—was accessible by rail and road and included staff housing, a 275-acre truck farm, a 1,575-acre cash farm and pasture, a greenhouse, and a dairy, all of which were worked by patients as occupational therapy. Planned for a population of 3,000, the hospital housed 4,000 by 1971, but since 1976 when deinstitutionalization became the practice, the number of patients has declined.