 Hi there, this is Jessica Haigman at Alden Library, and we are here today live on Instagram to show you another exhibit that we have on the fifth floor of the library, and I am here today with Stacey Lavender and Carmen B. Croft, and I will let you introduce yourselves and say what you do here at the library, as we've done so many times in the past. Sure. I'm Stacey. I'm the Special Collections Librarian here at Alden for our manuscript collections. And for those of us who aren't too familiar with that, what does manuscript mean? Sure. So, traditionally you think manuscript and you think handwritten, but that's not what it means in this case. Our manuscript collections are essentially archival collections that are not OU history related, so it could be anything from Civil War, World War II collections, it could be literary figure collections. In this case, we're going to be talking about collections related to the App and Spinal Hall Center. Awesome. Carmen? And I'm Carmen B. Croft. I'm the Digital Projects Librarian here, so I primarily take Stacey's material and get it online and do all of the associated work that it takes to make it possible to see those things and to find them. There's a lot of that, yeah, that happens, and this is actually imminently going to be really available online, I'm still working on it, but by the end of the year, you will be able to view all this material on your own computer. Awesome. All right, so the exhibit is a history of what we know as the ridges now. So we have material, we will start over here at the beginning, so this material is from the opening of what was then known as the, what was it first called? The Athens Lunatic Asylum. Okay. And so what do we have here at the beginning? Yeah, so I started off with the beginning talking about, the asylum was built, it's a Kirkbride institution, which was a popular way of designing mental health institutions at the time, which focused on having beautiful grounds, giving patients access to nature, having buildings that allowed patients for access to light and open spaces, that sort of thing. So there's some pictures of the interiors of the asylum and of the grounds, there's also on the back wall a really early plan from the asylum from I think 1872, it's in the 1872 annual report, that shows all the original buildings and what the grounds looked like. And so you said it had like 16 different names over the course of its life, to what we now know as the ridges. Yeah, yes, it changed pretty frequently and there's a timeline across the top of the exhibit that shows, that Carmen put together that shows the different time periods that are associated with each name. So it looks like we have kind of post-Civil War and then the longest time, it looks like maybe the Athens State Hospital. So what's happening during that time frame? So during that time frame you're seeing a meteoric rise of patient population. At one point in the mid-1950s you have 1,800 patients in a building that was originally designed for about 800. They are expanding their facilities as time goes by as well. 1890s is also the beginning of hydrotherapy, which is they got really into and it was continuous cold baths being stuck in a cold bathtub for hours being mummified in cold sheets. And there was a real belief that you could sweat out or wash off toxins and that would make you healthy. You also have, starting in the 1920s and 30s, electroshock therapy, which was very frequently used. There's a lot of accounts of them experimenting with different musical types in the waiting room to mitigate patients' fears. By 1950 at this point where we have low budget, high volume of patients, the community steps in a lot and starts to contribute their time and money and effort to provide really essential public services like ambulances, they bought an ambulance, they bought the intercom system, they bought electrical panels. They were doing stuff that you would really consider the state's responsibility. And these were mostly women in the community. The Athens State Hospital auxiliary was very active at this time period and they would do things like take the patients shopping. They would, things that are often devalued as women's frivolous pursuits like garden clubs, book clubs, ways to enrich patients' lives when there's no line item in the budget for it. They did have a reservation here. You see the gray ladies in their Red Cross uniforms. They were a volunteer organization. They did significant fundraising every year. And you can also see the publication of what was then the Ohio Department of Mental Hygiene and Corrections, which was also head charge of state prisons, was saying that they needed, what was it? They needed $107 million to retrofit their existing facilities and all state hospitals in the state were 12,000 patients over capacity. You are also seeing, as Ohio University is growing, a significantly higher amount of here, we can open this up for you. We're seeing a lot more engagement in the student population and especially with use of the grounds. It was, it very quickly got a reputation as a lover's lane. You can see in, it's literally called lover's lane here in 1943. Is this someone's yearbook or what is that? That is the Peter's range books. So W.E.P. Peter's was a surveyor in Athens County who took photos of every section of every range within the county. So it's a lot of landmarks that are no longer around. But this reputation of the grounds, which at this point were a thousand acres as a place to party, was definitely, it kind of came to a head in 1948 when the president of the university wrote to the superintendent, sorry, when the superintendent of the hospital wrote to the president of the university and said that on warm days the boys and girls both walk over here and lie around literally on top of each other with so few clothes on and then a driving through the grounds, one would think it was the naked city. The conduct has become actually disgusting and repulsive and has been reported to me by employees that students have been seen having sexual intercourse in broad daylight in plain view of the drives and walks. They build fires and on numerous occasions they've asked them not to do this, only to be told that their fathers are taxpayers, that it's a public property and they write the right to do anything they wish on it. And even in several decades later in the 1980s we're still seeing students lighting fires and they accidentally caught a tar paper roof on fire and they put it out with their beer. As you can see by this police department memo. In the back there you know a lot of student traditions and cultural touchstones came from the ridges such as if we come over here you can see infamous Jim Crocky who was an alligator who lived in the fountain at the administration building in the late 1920s and you can see behind it a photograph from perhaps the early 20th century of community members enjoying the manicured lawns and artificially created lakes on the property. So it sounds like there is a tension between like who owns the space, the university or the city or the hospital and who used to do that. And you've also you know a lot of students are doing research projects at the hospital, students are volunteering, there's even students who lived at the hospital rent-free in exchange for labor and helping the patients in later years. Yeah so there's a tension I think but it's also in a lot of ways a really sort of beautiful relationship between the institution and the community and you can see that in the collection as well. So how much time you spend researching, I don't imagine all of this information comes out of the sources. Like how do you, like the things about, there is something I can remember now, but like the the kind of contextual research that's happening here, how like, well that's kind of a process. A lot of the research that I do is in order to provide good metadata for the digital images going to be captured. So in order to be able to index this properly such that it can be searched or browsed upon and to provide some context because you know digital collections do some of the context collapse, everything is flattened, you don't have quite the structure so it's important to be able to say you know this is here because of this reason and this is how it relates to other things in the collection. One thing that we've been investing a lot of time on that Roe just showed you is the Green Hill News. We have 126 issues of that that have been fully digitized. We're working on redacting patients' last names out of it and these will be seen for the first time since they were created in the 1950s because of the last names they're not available in person so digital delivery is the only way forward and they've been in a closed portion of the collection for decades. So we're really excited about getting that online. So they're really wonderful, they really humanize. I think that patients, it's one of the few parts of the collection where you get to see like what their daily lives were like. And also their own perspectives. The patients are writing newsletter along with staff and so there's this great excerpt from the 60s of patients complaining about slovenly long haired attendance and how they should be held to the same standards of dressing comportment that the patients are. So yeah, just thinking about like of the digitization in addition to the process like the contextual research that has to go on here and the privacy considerations I think those are things that are often kind of invisible from the digitization process. So I'm glad we get to talk about some of the other stuff that's happening there. All right, so over here it looks like we have kind of a more recent. Yeah, we're entering the end game here. This is the last couple of decades when the site now known as the Ridges was still a hospital. As you can see this bifurcation on the timeline, the hospital itself moves offsite. It becomes much smaller and the site itself is the Ridges which is still in use today is the site of the Moinovich school. It's the Kennedy Museum of Art printing services. There's a number of university departments that use the buildings there. In the 1980s what this space was going to be used for was still up in the air. There were a bunch of really interesting proposals such as an equine park, a golf course, Acropolis World Gardens and Sculpture Park. The one of the most controversial was an early biotechnology, bioengineering firm which was dubbed in the letters to the editor to the Athens messenger, the Super Hogs program. Was that the biologist? Yeah, and the president's office did a couple of town hall meetings and you can also see some talking points in yellow under genetic engineering notions of ways that they were trying to ameliorate people's fears about messing with what should not be messed with. There's also fears about how this development would affect the natural resources and natural beauty of the site. Of course these are conversations we're still having today. It's literally still the same site, the same issues. The earliest building to be developed was the Dairy Barn into a Dairy Barn Art Center. It was an actual working dairy farm until I think the early 1960s. The building was derelict, it was going to be demolished. The Southeast Ohio Arts Council bought it, refurbished it and got it listed as a historic place. As we move into the 1970s, we see a complete change in how people with mental illnesses are given medical treatment in the U.S. Campaigns such as humanization, which you can see in the far corner, a lot more emphasis on patients' rights. You can't open up the visitor's guide unfortunately or the patient orientation packet. We move into the digital collection and that shows a real change in, you know, you are incarcerated here until we say you're fixed and instead of going to a program of co-treatment and patient buy-in and patients were given spending money, they were given their own clothing and had the ability to move about much more freely. We would be remiss, however, if we didn't mention the fact that in the 1950s, between 1953 and 1958, the asylum at that point, the state hospital, was the site of 219 lobotomies. Five people with that procedure. It was all the brainchild of this particular guy, Walter Freeman, who literally traveled the country in his lobotomobile and that's what he called it, trying to fix people using this revolutionary technique of psychosurgery. After his theories were discredited, he couldn't deal with that and so he spent the next several decades of his life going back to sites where he had done lobotomies and trying to prove that he had actually helped people's lives and so he produced a lot of debunked studies about the outcomes of his patients. So what would you hope that someone who visits this takes away from the exhibit or what you see as kind of the, I don't know, not the main point, but the... I mean, I think my main hope for take away for people, I think is mostly just that these materials are here, they're really rich, that this is an institution that's been around for a really long time, it has a really fascinating history full of change and so hopefully it just sort of makes people interested in the materials and makes them want to come back and look at them in the reading room or look at them online. Yeah, I do definitely want to emphasize the connection between the university and the community and get people excited to do their own research and so this, you know, we've given you a little bit of an overview of what is available here and it's up to you to take the next step. Excellent ending. All right, so thanks so much for telling us about that. I think I've made it better than that. So I'll just say thank you for your time and for showing us this and this is on the fifth floor of Alden Library, you can come in here whenever the archives is open. So what time, what's the name on that? It's 9 to 5, Monday through Friday and 12 to 4 on Saturdays during the semester. So stop in next time you're here. Thanks. Yay!