Anti-Tuberculosis Colony No. 1 (McKnight State Tuberculosis Hospital)
Carlsbad, Tom Green County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1911 the Texas Legislature passed a law calling for the establishment of state institutions for the treatment of tuberculosis. Founded across the highway in 1912, the Anti-Tuberculosis Colony No. 1 opened with facilities for 57 patients on a 330-acre tract of land. The Tuberculosis Nursing School was founded here in 1915, and by 1961 had graduated 500 male and female nurses. The colony developed into a self-sustaining community with an average population of 2,000. Housed in 36 buildings on 992 acres of land, the institution included a post office, library, public school, power plant, dairy, vegetable garden, bakery and butcher shops. It was renamed the State Sanatorium in 1919. Most patients were in residence for nine months. At its height the Sanatorium proved a treatment capacity for 950 adults and 250 children. The institution was renamed McKnight State Tuberculosis Hospital in 1955 in honor of Dr. J. B. McKnight, superintendent from 1914 to 1950. The advent of anti-tubercular drugs and thoracic surgery altered the treatment of tuberculosis and eventually the institution closed in 1971. Fifty thousand adults and 5,000 children received treatment here. (1997)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Responding to a 1911 state law, Texas opened Anti-Tuberculosis Colony No. 1 near Carlsbad in 1912, when fresh air and rest were the chief weapons against a deadly, contagious disease. The isolated facility grew into a self-sustaining community of some 2,000 people, with its own school, dairy, bakery, power plant, and a nursing school that trained 500 nurses. Renamed for longtime superintendent Dr. J. B. McKnight, it treated roughly 55,000 people before antibiotics and surgery made such sanatoria obsolete and it closed in 1971.
Why it matters
The sanatorium reflects an era when public health meant walling off the sick in self-contained colonies, a chapter closed only by the mid-century revolution in medicine.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was one of the deadliest diseases in America — a slow, contagious wasting sickness that filled hospitals and haunted families. There was no cure. The best medicine anyone could offer was fresh air, sunshine, rest, and good food, delivered far from the crowding of cities. Out of that belief grew the sanatorium movement, and states across the country began building isolated colonies where the sick could be separated from the healthy and given a fighting chance.
Texas answered that call in 1911, when the Legislature passed a law directing the state to establish institutions for treating tuberculosis. The dry, sunlit country of West Texas near Carlsbad was considered ideal — exactly the kind of open, high, clean-aired landscape doctors of the day prescribed. In 1912 the first of these institutions opened across the highway on a 330-acre tract, with room for just 57 patients.
This was the Progressive Era, when Americans placed enormous faith in institutions, science, and organized public health. Building an entire self-contained colony to fight a single disease felt like the modern, rational thing to do. Few could have imagined how large it would grow, or how completely medicine would one day render it obsolete.
People & events
What began as a modest camp for 57 patients swelled into something closer to a small city. At its height the institution spread across nearly a thousand acres and 36 buildings, with an average population around 2,000 — patients, staff, and their families. It had its own post office, library, public school, power plant, dairy, vegetable garden, bakery, and butcher shop. People were born, schooled, healed, and sometimes buried without ever leaving the grounds.
In 1915 the colony founded its own Tuberculosis Nursing School, and over the following decades it trained hundreds of men and women in the demanding, dangerous work of caring for the contagious. By 1961 some 500 nurses had earned their training here — a genuine engine of medical education in a remote corner of the state.
Presiding over much of this era was Dr. J. B. McKnight, superintendent from 1914 to 1950. Thirty-six years is a career and then some, spanning the institution's growth through two world wars and the long plateau before antibiotics arrived. When the hospital was renamed in his honor in 1955, it recognized a man who had essentially given his working life to this one place and the tens of thousands who passed through it. Most patients stayed about nine months — long enough to know the rhythms of the colony intimately before, they hoped, going home.
Its place in the American story
The story told on this hillside is the American sanatorium story in miniature. Across the country, from the Adirondacks to the Southwest, states and charities built these fresh-air colonies because they had no better weapon against a disease that killed indiscriminately. The scale was staggering: here alone, some 50,000 adults and 5,000 children received treatment before the doors closed.
What ended it was one of the great turning points in modern medicine. The arrival of anti-tubercular drugs in the mid-twentieth century, together with advances in thoracic surgery, meant tuberculosis could finally be treated with medication rather than months of enforced rest. Almost overnight, the logic of the sanatorium collapsed. Why isolate a patient for nine months when a course of drugs could do the work? Institutions like this one across America emptied and shut their gates. This one closed in 1971.
That closing is worth pausing over, because it represents a rare thing: a public-health problem so thoroughly solved that the enormous infrastructure built to manage it simply became unnecessary. The self-sustaining colony, once the height of medical modernity, was made obsolete by modernity itself.
If you visit
Stand at the marker and look across the highway, where the colony first opened in 1912. What strikes most visitors is the emptiness — the sheer scale of what once stood here against the quiet of the West Texas landscape today. It takes some imagination to populate these acres with 2,000 people, a working dairy, a bustling bakery, a school full of children, and wards of patients taking the air.
Think about the geography as you look around. The isolation that feels lonely now was the entire point: the dry air, the open sky, the distance from crowded towns were the medicine. This was a place chosen for what it lacked — congestion, dampness, foul air — as much as for anything it had.
If you're traveling through Tom Green County, this is a stop that rewards a slower pace and a bit of reflection. It fits naturally into a road trip tracing how everyday life in America was shaped by disease and the fight against it. There's a poignancy here worth sitting with: an entire community, built to hold back one illness, now returned to the landscape because we finally learned to cure it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Dr. J. B. McKnight
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Winters FFA Chapter
Winters, TX
In the fall of 1928 thirty students in the vocational agriculture class at Winters High School organized a Future Farmers club, the same year the national FFA was founded in Kansas City. On April 10, 1930, the club received the first Texas charter of the national organization. Over the decades the Winters chapter produced award-winning students and generations of farmers and businessmen across Runnels County.
Sheep and Goat Industry in Texas
San Angelo, TX
Spanish explorers brought the first sheep to the Southwest in the 1500s, and Spanish missions relied on them for food and cloth. Angora goats arrived in Texas in 1853, and from 1857 George Wilkins Kendall pioneered modern sheep ranching, crossbreeding Mexican churro with fine-wooled merino. The Edwards Plateau's land and climate proved ideal, and after 1870 the industry boomed—making Texas the nation's leading producer and San Angelo its great wool and mohair market.
Arden Community
Mertzon, TX
Arden took its name from John Arden, a sheep raiser who reached this west Texas range in 1876, and grew into a ranching community as homesteaders filtered in after 1900. Neighbors shared a schoolhouse for Baptist, Church of Christ, and Methodist worship and gathered for camp meetings at a creekside grove. A string of droughts steadily drained the settlement — the post office closed in 1942 and the school in 1947 — leaving Arden among the many west Texas communities that faded back into open country.
The Maier House
Tankersley, TX
Fredericksburg builder George Brockman raised this Victorian home in 1891 and sold it two years later to Edward Maier, who remodeled it before marrying Bertha Jung and raising two sons here. A rancher and businessman, Maier led the San Angelo National Farm Loan Association for more than two decades, tying his household to the agricultural credit that sustained West Texas farming.