San Haven Postcard 1940
I found this postcard in a box at an antique store. It’s a postcard of San Haven Sanatorium in 1940. I was impressed that this postcard shows an overview of the grounds including the beautiful gardens and water feature which are now completely dry and overgrown.
This postcard was sent by someone named Olga, who must have been visiting a patient named Hilda, to Mrs. Harold Wendt in Columbia, Wisconsin on February 19th, 1940. It reads:
Dear Mabel,
How are you all? Seems like I’ve been gone a month. We’ve seen so many people we hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. Hilda is so much better. Doesn’t look as though she had gone through an operation. I’ll be home soon. Olga
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I grew up in Dunseith just south of the San and have many fond memories of the place. I had friends that lived there and would spend time up there playing on the grounds and running through the steam tunnels that connected all the buildings. I was up there last summer and took pictures. It is a shame that such a beautiful place was let to go to the ruin it is now. With all the money that is wasted in this country, surely it could have been and should have been preserved as a national landmark. There is tons of history there.
Do you know if this site is open to the public to metal detect on or if there was someone in the area to get permission to get on the property. George 701-789-0886
It’s sad to see all those buildings going down; they are all condemned and the place is a horse pasture. My great-aunt was hospitalized there when Dad was young. I told him it must have been a beautiful place at one time. He replied that it had always been ugly. I guess if you were there for its real purpose, you see it in entirely different eyes.
My uncle Glen had TB when he was in the Army…He was in San Haven when I was really young…I remember going there to visit …I couldn’t go in the hospital, but I remember a pond out front that had huge goldfish in it…and a beautiful park like grounds….
Also, there is a TV show that featured it as a haunted place. I haven’t seen it but it does have a lot of tragic history there that could account for that.
When I was about ten years old my father was a patient at San Haven. Children were not allowed inside, we could only stand on the lawn and wave at him through his window. While our mother visited Dad, my sister, my brother I roamed the grounds. They were beautiful and exciting. I remember especially the large goldfish pond with hundreds of flowers surrounding it. There was a little store where we could buy treats as we waited for visitation hours to end, and our drive back to Nanson ND where we lived. This was in 1943-45.
My mom (Dorothy May Fahey) was a patient at San Haven when she was 6 years old. She was born in 1927 in Lakota, ND. She befriended a little boy while she was there part of her first grade and all of her second grade. My mom passed away May 11, 2010 never finding out what became of her childhood friend. She graduated from high school, worked in the Bank of Lakota, married Rudolph Hanson, had eight children, moved to Wisconsin, and worked as a nurses assistant in River Falls.
I would appreciate any information regarding a little boy who once was my mom’s friend while they both were at San Haven. Mom always commented how the older patients tutored them both as they were the two youngest ones there.