I went to the third floor of the ugly concrete building and chatted up the reference librarians, who pointed me towards a jungle of gray filing cabinets. Fine white spiderweb dust lifted into the air when I opened the proper drawer and shuffled for the correct file. Maybe one day they’d get around to putting all this on microfilm, or microfiche, or whatever medium a twenty-first-century library is expected to use. But sometimes I think it’s true what they say about this part of the country—you may as well set your clocks back twenty years.

And there it was: “Pine Breeze.”

The file was thicker than I’d expected, and the old sticker label was peeling its slow way free of the folder. I pulled the whole thing out with both hands and closed the cabinet with a shove of my hip.

The first page was a mounted newspaper clipping dated March of 1930. “Tuberculosis Hospital to Close, Reopen,” the headline read. I scanned it hastily, picking out the phrases that looked important and ignoring everything else. Established 1913. Staffed by Red Cross, Salvation Army nurses. Bought by private investors—a local family. To be converted to a health spa. Interesting, but well before the time period relevant to me. I lifted the sheet out and prepared to put it aside, but not before a passage had time to leap off the page—“where some two thousand people perished during the TB epidemic . . .”

Two thousand people? That sounded like an awful lot.

I reached for the next item in the folder.

1946. A neat diagram of the campus compound, laid out on yellowing paper. I counted nine buildings, including a nurse’s station set away from the main grouping. I concentrated hard, trying to decipher the tiny writing on the key at the right of the page.

Building 1: Administration headquarters. Former infirmary.

Building 2: Auditorium/gymnasium.

Building 3: Furnace house (for disposal of contaminated corpses).

Contaminated corpses? Then they burned the bodies of the tuberculosis victims, and they needed an entire building to do so. Maybe that two thousand estimate wasn’t so high after all.

Building 4: Doctors’ offices.

Building 5: Outpatient services.

Building 6: Cafeteria/food service facilities.

Building 7: Inpatient therapy.

Building 8: Rehabilitation dormitories.

Building 9: Nurse’s station.

This was helpful. I made a mental note to hit the copy machine before leaving.

Next was a series of yellowed articles bearing headlines like, “Health Facility Seeks Federal Aid,” and “Pine Breeze Sanatorium Investigated for Racial Inequality.” The rest of the loose papers seemed to be articles about money problems, so I flipped past them in search of something more recent.

1968: Ah. There it was. “Federal Grant to Fund Hospital for Adolescents in North Chattanooga.” Operated by Marion Finley. Would serve up to eighty patients, primarily substance-addicted and behaviorally problematic teenagers. Hmm. If Dave was right and the school was only serving fifteen or twenty kids back when it closed, then it really had fallen shy of projections.