Bay Window Parlor with Tiled Fireplace, Fergus Falls Kirkbride Building, Minnesota

This parlor sits within the Fergus Falls State Hospital, designed by architect Warren B. Dunnell and completed in 1890 under the Kirkbride Plan for treating mental illness. The hospital operated for more than a century, closing in 2005 and later renamed the Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center. Its main building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Rooms like this one, with bay windows and decorative mantels, were part of the administrative and residential wings designed to bring natural light and a sense of order into the patients' daily surroundings, a hallmark of Thomas Story Kirkbride's 19th-century asylum philosophy.

Photo taken in June 2014.