Today people flock to bucolic Cranbury Park in Norwalk perhaps to see the majestic Gallaher Estate, catch a show at the Carriage House Theater, practice their disc golf skills or walk with their dogs along the wooded trails.

But there was a time when people went there under less pleasant circumstances. The park was once home to a sanitarium.

Dr. Edwin Everett Smith’s Kensett Sanitarium began operation in 1886, serving individuals with “nervous diseases, mental alienation, alcoholic and narcotic addictions,” according to information provided by Holly Cuzzone, a member of the preservationist group Friends of Cranbury Park, until a fire destroyed it in 1912.

In the days leading up to the fire, Jan. 28, 1912, horse-drawn carriages filled with mentally unstable occupants trundled the roadways from South Norwalk. Carriage drivers picked up passengers from the old train station, before they left for the sanitarium on the hill. As they traveled north through the city, the carriages and their occupants would have met Field Street, a road on which, according to census records, Smith resided. Eventually the journey would have ended on a wide, partially-bricked roadway that bisects Cranbury Park from Field to Grumman streets. The road was an extension of Field Street, which Cuzzone found depicted on an old postcard showing the sanitarium.

The title of the postcard read: “The Lane Through the Woods at Kensett Sanitarium.”

According to newspaper accounts, the fire that eventually consumed the buildings on the sweeping grounds of the sanitarium began in a defective flue in the attic. A raging wall of fire boiled through Smith’s sanctuary, melting glass windowpanes into amorphous, molten sheets, eradicating medical equipment and spiking flames high into winter sky. Patients scattered outside in terror. Firemen battled in vain to save battled in vain to save the main building, where most of the patients were housed. Flames eventually leapt to Smith’s private cottage.

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