Kilbuck
Dixmont
Former state hospital, Kilbuck
On 11 November 1862 the Western Pennsylvania Hospital opened a department for the insane on a bluff above the Ohio, in Kilbuck Township, across from Sewickley. Dorothea Dix had pressed for a hospital of this kind, and the place was named Dixmont. The main building, Reed Hall, was a Kirkbride plan, long wings off a central block. It closed on 30 June 1984. Patients went to Mayview and to Woodville. The state sold the campus in 1999, and in 2006 the buildings were taken down for a Walmart that was never built. Cutting into the hill sent a landslide onto Ohio River Boulevard and the railroad that September. Walmart dropped the store in 2007.
The cemetery could not be sold with the land. The state still holds it. More than 1,300 patients were buried there between 26 May 1863 and 8 March 1937, most of them under numbered concrete markers. On 17 July 2014 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found the hillside grown over and the markers down, and the state then sent a crew. The hospital is gone. Off Roosevelt Road, with private land around it, the cemetery is what is left.
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