The main building at the West Tennessee Mental Health Institute
PHOTO: State of Tennessee
HARDEMAN

County Seat: Bolivar
In the 1880s, a Confederate Colonel named Paul Jones donated land to start a home here for people with mental disabilities. It opened in 1889 and for many years was known as the West Tennessee Hospital for the Insane. By the 1950s it had more than 2,000 patients -- too many, as it turned out -- and in following years several other mental hospitals were built in Tennessee (now there are five in the state). Today the West Tennessee Mental Health Institute takes care of about 250 patients and is scattered on a campus with several buildings and has 700 employees, making it the largest employer in Bolivar. But the future of its beautiful original structure is somewhat in doubt, since it badly needs renovation.
Stanley Scott in his college yearbook

Here's another story with a Hardeman County hook to it: Stanley Scott was born in Bolivar in 1933 into a family that had started some of the first black-oriented newspapers in the South. “It wasn’t exactly an impoverished family by the black standards of the day, but at 10 or 12 Scott learned how to clean newsroom floors and live on the coins brought in by circulation fees,” a Chicago Tribune columnist later wrote.

 

Scott went to the University of Kansas, served in the Korean War, and then became a reporter. In 1964 he became the first black general assignment reporter for United Press International. A few years later he was the only reporter present when black nationalist Malcolm X was assassinated. Then, Scott went to work as a communications man in the administrations of President Richard Nixon, and later President Gerald Ford.

 

Stanley Scott died of cancer in 1992. The cancer center at Louisiana State University is named for him.



Here's a picture of the Hardeman County Courthouse.

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