Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Hardwick, GA

Hardwick is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Baldwin County, Georgia, located just south of Milledgeville and counted within the Milledgeville micropolitan statistical area.

The 2020 census counted 3,513 people in the Hardwick CDP, a sharp drop from 3,930 in 2010 and 5,135 in 2000, when the census place was known as Midway-Hardwick.

Hardwick is built around Central State Hospital, the state psychiatric hospital whose campus defines the community.

Central State Hospital began in the 1840s as Georgia's state asylum — originally the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum — near what was then the state capital at Milledgeville.

By the 1960s Central State Hospital had grown to some 200 buildings spread over a campus of about 1,750 acres and served roughly 12,000 patients, making it the largest mental hospital in the world at the time.

In 1959 an exposé of conditions at the hospital by Atlanta Constitution reporter Jack Nelson won a Pulitzer Prize and spurred reforms in Georgia's mental health system.

The hospital operates today on a much smaller scale, serving around 200 patients, including a maximum-security forensic unit housed in the Cook Building for patients found not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial.

Hardwick is historically notable as the 19th-century home of Oglethorpe University, which operated there from the 1830s until the Civil War era before later being refounded in Atlanta.

The historic Central State Hospital cemeteries, where thousands of patients were buried, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

Baldwin State Prison, a Georgia Department of Corrections facility formerly known as the Georgia Women's Correctional Institution, is located in the Milledgeville area near Hardwick.