50 Years of Growth – April ’26

Healing Through the Land

Long before Queens County Farm Museum became a public cultural institution, this land was part of the historic Creedmoor Psychiatric Center campus, an institution founded on the belief that environment, routine, and meaningful work could support healing.

As explored in Christopher Payne’s book Asylum with a foreword by Oliver Sacks, facilities like Creedmoor once incorporated farming and gardening into daily life. Patients worked the land, tended crops, and spent time outdoors; activities that, for some, offered a sense of purpose, calm, and connection.

By the mid-20th century, however, this model began to unravel. What began as a high-minded ideal to support healing through structured work and meaningful connection to nature gradually eroded. In many institutions, these noble intentions devolved into routine labor, carried out within overcrowded, often under-resourced systems where the original therapeutic purpose was largely lost.

At the same time, broader changes in psychiatric care began to reshape the system. The deinstitutionalization movement of the 1950s through the 1970s led to the closure or downsizing of many large state hospitals, driven by new medications and growing awareness of institutional conditions. As documented in Susan Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, the results were deeply mixed; while many patients gained “freedom,” many others were left without adequate support, structure, or the meaningful daily engagement that farm and gardening work provided.

Remnants of this earlier chapter still exist here at Queens Farm.

Our cold frames, which are simple, ground-level growing structures used to extend the growing season, trace their lineage back to this therapeutic landscape. While the history is complex, it reflects a moment when access to nature and hands-on work were seen as essential to well-being.

Today, those same cold frames continue to serve a renewed purpose.

They support our growing operations, seed our fields, and connect thousands of visitors each year to the rhythms of the natural world. What was once part of aclinical setting has come full circle as a space for public learning, reflection, and renewal.

At Queens Farm, we carry forward the best of that earlier idea: Connection to land, purpose, and care within a setting that is open, inclusive, and grounded in community.