The Pine Breeze Blues

 I was 16 years old, Very Depressed, Angry ,Upset at every everything Abandoned by everybody!As Dad had left us behind in Tennessee only a few letters would come from him and his side of the family my whole life.Mom work all the time, So she had No Time for me, even when I was little.

My sister Glenda, was much older than me she was married had a family of her own!My Grand father had died whom I adored My grandmother was in her on world !My aunt Marie whom I was just starting to be come close with blew her head off. My other aunt' s Judy killed there  self 's.My aunt Betty  never tried to be to close I guess her an mama didn't get along very well. I had no one not even another brother or sister too talk are relate too!

I got Nothing out of life & I didn't understand why! It seemed I was always In Everybody’s way Something/one to make fun of, pushed aside..A outsider even to my self. I often describe my life as I’m not there.or here even, so displaced ,its not me.....I’m looking at my life from outside in! not the way its suppose to be! From Inside out! So I decide I would end it all I heard you could Die from drinking to fast...This was to be my way out! why not my aunts did it! So I found a quart of vodka. under mama kitchen cabinet and I downed it..Put my Nazareth(hair of the dog) album on pops old stereo listen to Please Don’t Judaism  Me .........Over & Over & Over Again!

Well it turns out I failed. All I got was very drunk! In a lot of trouble as decide to go to school,I had a friend take me ( Thanks Jim  Puckett my old  softball couch) Almost got hit by a bus I walk in front of. Went into LVH school told any an everybody what I thought of them!  Principle,Teachers, Classmates, Even cussed out my mother!

I ended up at Fort wood Metal Heath Center under the care of Dr .Holland,( Whom later jumped of a bridge and killed him self because...he had sexual charges about to be placed on him for molesting some boys in his care!) 

He did that some years later So Even my shrink was Crazy ..How about That!

well any way.....He ,mama ,the school ,even a judge decide... I need to too be lock away for awhile. So that’s how I got to Pine Breeze.

Pine Breeze 1992 Before they tore it down but it history begins as early as late 1800's

Abandoned Lupton building at former Pine Breeze Sanatorium,

was located on Hamilton Avenue

in North Chattanooga.

Originally a tuberculosis hospital from 1913-1968, Abandoned over 55 years it became a hospital for emotionally disturbed children in 1968

 known as the Pine Breeze Center. It closed 1982 and reopened at Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute 

Some Facts

1879-1919

EMMA   BELL   MILES

In February 1917 Miles entered Pine Breeze, the county tuberculosis sanitarium,

 later returning to Walden's Ridge, where she began a series of bird paintings.

That fall she returned to Pine Breeze, where she remained, living in a tent provided by the Chattanooga Writer's Club, until a few months before her death 

on March 19, 1919. 

Bedridden most of the time, Miles managed to complete the bird book she had always dreamed of writing and illustrating. Our Southern Birds came off the press 

just two weeks before she died at the age of thirty-nine.