Description
All Roads Lead to Rocky Knoll is a publication documenting Sheboygan County-based health care beginning with Winooski (1876) to Rocky Knoll (2026). It is not a complete history, but a timeline of sorts and a short introduction to where patient care began in Sheboygan County and where it is today.
Formal county-based healthcare began with what was called an Insane Asylum in 1876 in tiny settlement of Winooski in the town of Lyndon. We proceed to the Insane Asylum in Sheboygan, built in 1881 which, as treatment progressed was called the Sheboygan County Hospital. As that facility aged out, patients moved to what would become Sheboygan County Comprehensive and they were residents who may have had cognitive disabilities or mental health issues. Some just had no where else to go. There are a couple side trips which figure in such as the old Sheboygan County hospital housing WWII German POWs for a short time and then its final duty housing Park Lawn, a private rest home. Sunny Ridge was county-based for much of its existence until it was privatized. And we finish up at Rocky Knoll as it transformed from a Tuberculosis Sanitorium to today’s multi-functional care facility– All Roads Lead to Rocky Knoll.
Side notes: Sanatorium versus sanitorium, which is correct? Actually, both are fine. Sanatorium is more a British word and sanitarium, American. They are, for the most part, used interchangeably.
Many thanks to the Sheboygan Press and the Plymouth Review for allowing SCHRC to use newspaper information and photos to construct this remembrance document. We are grateful for your dedication to historical education.
Thanks to Gary Klein, Sheboygan Press photographer and videographer, for use of his beautiful contemporary Rocky Knoll images. Gary’s commitment to history is much appreciated.
