 And welcome to this edition of Authors at Alden. I'm Scott Seaman. I'm Dean of Libraries. And it's a real pleasure to welcome you tonight for this latest event. Tonight, we have a conversation between Doug McCabe and Catherine Ziff about Catherine's book, Asylum on the Hill, History of a Healing Landscape. The book produced in cooperation with the Ohio University Press. Catherine is also a mental health counselor at the Plains Elementary in the Plains near Athens. Asylum on the Hill was published in 2012. So we're just past the one-year anniversary of the publication. And a recent review in the issue of the Library Magazine Choice said that this is a beautifully written, articulately researched historical work that tells the story of the Athens lunatic, Asylum. It also tells the story of the life and times of patient care in Ohio. Choice awarded its highest recommendation. And it's a real privilege for us to have Catherine with us tonight. I will say that the Ohio University has brought a few copies of the book for sale in the corner back there. And I'm told Catherine will be willing to sign. Sure. For those of you joining on the web, I'd encourage you to get a copy of the book at your local bookseller. Or you can just Google Ohio University Press and order it directly from the Press's website. Hosting our conversation tonight is Doug McCabe. Doug is curator of manuscripts in the Mons Center for Archives and Special Collections here in Alden Library. He's our resident expert on the Athens Asylum. Doug has also put together an extraordinary display of rarely seen archival materials that's just off to the side. If you've not had a chance to see that, please, after the conversation, take a look. We also welcome our online audience as we are webcasting this live with the help of our friends at WOUB public media. Thanks as well to everyone at the Ohio University Alumni Association and Office of Events Services for all of their help. Thank you all for coming. And Doug and Catherine, I'll turn it over to you now. OK, well, thank you, Scott. And welcome, Catherine, and welcome, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you all here and for everybody on the web as well. What a thrill. This is the first time the authors at Alden has been done over the web. So we hope that this is an important beginning to webcasting. Wow. My old friend, Doug. Where do we start? Well, why don't we start with where you're from and what led you on up to Athens like you went to school someplace. You were born somewhere, all those fun things. Well, I'm from North Carolina and moved here with my family about 15 years ago. This is our 15th year here. And I have various degrees. I have a doctorate from Ohio University here in Councilor Ed, also one from Wake Forest in Counseling. Before that, a master's degree in public policy and way back sociology from Chapel Hill. And all those strands of education kind of came together with the focus of the book, actually. Well, and then you needed to do a dissertation for your doctorate here. I did. And that's where this all got started. Where in the world? I was thinking on the way in here tonight, I know I'm weird. And that's why I'm really interested in the asylum and all that kind of thing. But I know you're not weird. And I'm not sure why you got going on it. Actually, it was my mother's idea. It was my mother's idea. I was thinking 13 years ago about a dissertation topic. She came up from North Carolina to visit me with my father and couldn't help but notice the asylum up there. And she said, well, why don't you write about that asylum up there on the hill? And that was actually a very good fit, being a mental health counselor and also having studied public policy. In particular, years ago at Virginia Tech, I became interested in the work of sociologist Martin Rine, who spoke of storytelling and narrative as a way to do public policy analysis. So that were some strands that really fit for me in beginning this research, which ultimately became a book. Well, and then you had to figure out where in the world to go looking for stuff. I did. And you asked one or two questions, and all roads lead to you, Doug. And so I began asking about the asylum, which led to Doug, to you, and to Alden's, the Mon Center for Archives and Special Collections, which, if you don't know, is on the fifth floor and is just a fabulous place, very probably of a quiet reputation, but a wonderful living archive. I like to think of it. And Doug, you told me a very important thing. You're very patient. I know you have a lot of people come and ask you about the asylum. You're very patient. But you said, it's a room with 1,000 doors. And I thought, a room with 1,000 doors, meaning by that, there are so many ways to study the place, whether time periods, eras, the treatment methods, the people, the psychiatry, the cemeteries, the Civil War, how are you going to narrow it down? And so I narrowed down to the idea of studying the asylum and its interactions, its connections with the community of Athens. But still, there was over 150 years of history and where do you go to begin to focus? And so what time period? Well, very quickly, I had a dream and sort of being in mental health. I write down my dreams. I take note of them. Little bit of a Jungian strand there. And I dreamt that I was in the attic of the asylum, way up in the attic. Now, I have been in the attic, and it's a very kind of a cramped feeling, low ceilings, it's dark, it's dusty, they're small windows. But in the dream attic, there were, I mean, one very spacious room. There were many rooms, but I was in one room at high ceilings, polished woodwork, painted walls, big windows you could see outside. But it was full of very old artifacts, antique furniture, old kind of Victorian silver candlesticks, mirrors, all kinds of old artifacts. And so that kind of led me to the idea of studying the asylum at the very, it's very beginning years, as it, the six or seven years of construction and formation, and then the 20 years ending in about 1893 of the moral treatment era. So that took me to that. And then you begin to widen again. So you develop, you know, research methods. You develop this, how do you develop categories to study, because still even within that time period. So it's a process of making long lists of details from history books, asylum, some of the basic information that's available, and coming up with general topics to begin to study, which then became chapters of a book, chapters of your dissertation. So you collapse all these details into several categories, eventually, landscape, architecture, patients and families, business and politics, which kind of go together, and caregivers. So, and from there then, with these categories in hand, you begin to dive in into the archives. And that's when the archivists start opening drawers, bringing out boxes, bringing out photographs. And just a word about archivist Doug, and I want to say also Bill Kimmick, and Janet Carlton, and Judy, and George Bain, who was there earlier, are experts, archivists anywhere, are experts at co-researchers. They're your very best friends in a research project, especially when you're dealing and reading about things where there's no one alive, it's very solitary. So it's really important to have your archivist co-researchers. They're always there. They're always interested in what you're doing. They're always willing to go find a box, bring it out, and also to suggest a resource that you haven't thought of. And they're always happy for you when you make some progress. You find some little snippet that gives you a window into one family's life as related to a patient at the asylum, and it's so exciting because these things are hard to find, and the archivists get excited with you. So very important, the role of not only all the information, but the archivists themselves. Well, I remember back in those days when you were doing your research, and you'd pull up this and go, look at this. You know, it was new information for me too, and that was really exciting and interesting to pick up on that and then be able to pass that along to other people who are coming in and approaching that thousand door room from a different door because it really is that way. You have all these hundreds thousand approaches into that one institution. So yeah, I think one of the important things that you're pointing out, and I think this is very important, is any of us really, whether we're still students or we're students, have gone through that process of narrowing it down and narrowing down and narrowing down, tightening things up so that you can come up with something that makes some sense beyond a third grade book report. With primary research. Well, right. So I wanted to ask you, did you find that you turned to secondary sources? First, general histories of asylums in America and things like that, and did that help guide you towards at least direction of themes, I would guess? Yes, actually there was something on every floor of the library that I used. First floor, you have microforms where all the microfilms, and you can go back and read way back the Athens Messenger, if you can, along you can read those microfilms without getting seasick, you know, back and forth, but there you could read the accounts of the parade that was held when the asylum was, the cornerstone was laid, or you can read about their social gatherings that were held, private parties that were held at the asylum or the Fourth of July celebrations or if a patient had escaped. So you could read in that, which was sort of popular culture in newspapers. And then on the, let's see, second floor, we have the cafe and we have the computer, so there's always things to do there. The third floor, fine arts library, if you wanted to look in some cases, I wanted to look back at some of the books, art books that have, are devoted to art made by patients in asylums across the world. You can go and look at that. Fourth floor, you check out books. Fifth floor is the really heart of all the archives, the Mons Center for Archives and Special Collections, government documents which have very important source of information about the asylum that anyone can access and those are the annual reports where they are long lists of what was purchased, lots of information aggregated about patients, narratives from the superintendents about what was important that year, what they needed from the state, the trustees reports, staff changes, just huge resource there. And then on the sixth and seventh floors, you have the histories, the histories of the Civil War of Ohio, of the nation, as related to the time period, medicine, psychiatry, history of psychiatry, if you wanna understand about post-traumatic stress disorder and what it might have been called during the Civil War, soldier's heart, you could read in the book and get all that kind of general background. And then... So you have all that. You found that you needed, for your research, to get into records that are classified as classified. Because of HIPAA. HIPAA laws still govern very old medical records which asylum commitment documents are and the Iman Center holds thousands up to 1913. Yeah, approximately in 1874 to 1913 and then there are some gaps in there too. Of commitment documents, which would include decision from the probate court, a narrative from a physician and sometimes other things put in. And those, you have to either show that you are a direct relative of a patient or you go through a process of approval from the State Department of Mental Health to show that you're doing research. And then you have access to all those patient records as well as files which contain things like letters that patients wrote but were confiscated and not mailed. Letters that were written to patients. A case book which is in a library in Columbus and things like that. So then you begin to delve into days and days and days of reading narratives of commitment of patients. I read all the ones. You can look up, there's some cross-reference book. You can look up and find out where people were from. I read all the ones for people from Athens and then expanded and read, I don't know, a thousand or more other documents. Yeah, there's loads of them. Well, the way things were for the Athens asylum that covered Southeast Ohio, now that's kind of 18 counties in Southeast Ohio so it could go as far east as Belmont and then as far west as Lawrence County, as far north as, I'll say Fairfield County and then to the Ohio River. But that could change over time. And so some counties would be added and some dropped. And then too, I don't know if you looked at some of these, but there were times when there were transfers of patients from say the Columbus Asylum or the Cleveland Asylum, even as far away as Cleveland. I assume that was from overcrowding up in Cleveland. When the asylum opened, that happened and also patients were taken from poor houses, county homes around the state who had mental illness or redeemed to have that and they were brought here as well, sometimes on the train in straight jackets. Right, so the earliest patients, many of them were brought over from Dayton or Cincinnati where there were already asylums. Columbus already had an asylum, so did Cleveland, Toledo came after the Athens Asylum. But so I think out of 88 counties in the state of Ohio, there's something like, I don't know, 57 counties represented. Now some of these counties would only have maybe a couple of patients who might be sent here, but still. And this was done through probate courts so there had to be an application for a person to be sent to the Athens Asylum, meaning that the asylum had the final decision as to whether to accept any patient or not. And one of the things that I don't know if you looked at these, but we do have some rejected applications. Rejected, and they would say rejected, not insane, or sometimes it was very difficult for the staff to figure out how to best care for people with seizure disorders and they were kind of discouraged and would not accept sometimes people with what they called epilepsy then. So would you agree that in those first years in particular, and I guess maybe through a good bit of that moral treatment time period, we're not seeing professional psychiatrists or psychologists. We're seeing mostly just regular doctors. Oh, as far as the commitment goes, it would be a doctor, a physician, somewhere in a county, absolutely. Psychiatry was just beginning as a profession and the asylum superintendents were part of that, but as far as the physicians would go, it would be a regular general practice kind of a physician, making their best guess. So you would be relying upon your local county physician to decide whether you were insane. And what family and friends came and said to you about you to the court as well. Moral treatment, I think most people, and I think myself too for that matter, when I first heard that, so these people are immoral and we're gonna turn them into moral people? I mean, it's probably more than that, isn't it? I mean, that's not really all there was to it. Exactly, it was moral in the sense of humane treatment and it came from a Quaker based small asylum that was built in England in the 1790s, William T. Quaker T. Merchant thought something needed to be done and he built a small asylum and it was to feature regular kind treatment, humane treatment, regular meals, activities were part of the treatment, beautiful views, work and walking outdoors. And this was really a sea change from the earlier assignments when the treatment relied on very punitive kinds of things, shocking things like a trap door, it was called the bath of surprise. There would be a trap door in the floor and a patient, it would be opened when a patient was walking and you'd be plunged into cold water with the idea that you could be shocked out of your mental illness and so this idea of moral treatment was a very big change. Brought to the United States and picked up by a Quaker. Curby had picked up by another Quaker in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania hospital for the insane Kurt Bride, hence the Kurt Bride architecture. He developed and brought to America a codified how this moral treatment should be done and architecture and landscape were a good part of it. So it's the architecture, it's the landscape and then with the architecture, as you can kind of see with the drawing behind us here, most of those windows indicate private rooms. They're probably about nine feet by 12 feet or something like that. They were built small so that the temptation would not be to double people up. Which was quickly abused, but the idea being that people had private space and private time and then in between, there were day rooms, I guess we might call them now. Parlers. Activity rooms, parlers. And situated to catch the prevailing breeze. The, you know, the mandala shape, the round grill work that's on the windows there was for security, but it was kind of disguised as hopefully something beautiful rather than prison-like bars, though it did serve the same function. Outdoors, walking outdoors was a big airing. In the case any of you are still believing that the flakes out in front were in the shapes of playing card suits, they never were and you can see some maps over here to show that that's the case, I think it's a matter of transference because when you look at the bars on the windows, you can spot within the designs three out of four playing card suits. So, a legend dispelled, right? Okay. Not there. Not there. So earliest treatments included, still, these cold baths and hot baths, right? Right. But they're just no trap door. No trap door. Well, later in the 20th century, there were, you know, the needle showers, the salt wraps, hydrotherapy came into play in the 20th century, electroconvulsive shock therapy, philobotomy years, all the chapters of psychiatry. But in those earliest days, it would been soothing baths. Soothing baths. Taking walks. Exercise. Work too. Work. The superintendents were always saying, we can't make people work, but it really helps them sleep better if they can work. This asylum, the superintendents in the 19th century were leaders in Ohio of the non-restraint movement. So it was very, very, very limited use of physical restraints and chemical strength sedatives as well. So they worked very hard to do that. Some patients had the walk of the grounds, others did not, it just depended. Well, not in the earliest days, I guess, come to think of it, but there were enclosed areas later on, enclosed courtyards, so that more excited patients might be able to still get outside. Move around, so. And one of the things that's interesting to a counselor like myself is that some of these things in the last 20 years have come back into play as a complement to mental health treatment. We know walking outdoors, all kinds of wonderful data coming out now of the benefits of walking outside for depression, for example. The use of art and so forth, some of these moral treatment kinds of things are back with us. Well, an art and indoor plants were very popular at the time as well. Oh, yeah, there was a greenhouse that kept flowers supplied throughout the asylum. Walks outside, out through the grounds. And in Japan now, there's a movement called forest bathing, in which we now know, with quantitative means, that two hours of walking in the forest will lower your levels of depression and elevate your mood, all the things that they were doing then kind of as best practice. Well, and I think you'll be able to see, too, with some of the materials on display, some of the older, a lot of the sepia-toned photographs there were taken in the early 1890s, when it was, they were very proud of the place at that point, because the landscaping had finally matured, and you have, well, we even have a paper about all of the flora and the special plantings that were done all around the asylum, and the special walkways, and you'll see photographs of cascades and falls. This was an extraordinary landscape, and it still is, you know, it still is, they're vestiges of the old landscape. You can see the old stone spring, there's still apple trees up there, it's still the vestiges of those days. Now, I mentioned earlier about no real training for most doctors. What kind of training did attendants have? At the very beginning, none, and as you could see, as the years went on, the superintendent's attendants would write in their annual reports, well, we really need to attend to who we choose to hire to be attendants, how they're trained, and so, eventually, by 1911, 1913, we had a nursing school here that trained nurses specifically to work in asylums. Yeah, we also, again, to plug the display material. Excuse me, but it's also to give you some idea of all of the different kinds of records that we have in the MON Center to help, when you open any one of those thousand doors, we have some employee records, including employment cards, you can leaf through those and see so-and-so lasted one day. Other people, when I said weeks, wow, or years for that matter. And then you can also see their pay scale and their pay rates when they were given raises and that kind of thing. It was a great place to work. It was a huge bonus for the town of Athens to have the asylum with all the money that was spent in the town to buy everything that was needed. And it was people, this was during the period of the long depression, which was multiple years, decade long. Many businesses were failed. It was very hard times. And so to have a job at the asylum was a plumb job if it agreed with you. In a place to stay at the asylum. You lived on-site and you had a job? How many times did you read a patient suffering from financial embarrassment, if I remember that one correctly? Financial embarrassment, yeah. Worry about a financial loss. I was thinking about the, in the book there are several spots that have the letters and very interesting things that happen to be tucked away in those commitment documents, little treasures. And one was a kind of a window into life, into a family in Ohio. How do you care for a family member who was quite ill and an elderly man was brought here actually on the first day of spring in the 1880s and a little note, I found a little handwritten note in pencil from the man's son. And he said, father was insane in the first of his sickness. Father was first doctored by beers for the liver complaint. I think the treatment was a Calamil with other medications. Beers being called away and could not attend. We called Dr. Anderson. He doctored him for the liver, kidney and dropsy. Dr. Leflin said he must die, could not live two weeks. Anderson the same. He still continued to swell till his hips and legs, the skin bursted open and his flesh looked like a cherry red and he got entirely helpless. I boiled corn and lye and let the steam go to his wounds and the swelling began to go down. I gave him spicewood tea, which I believe is also the redbud. It's another name for the redbud. I gave him spicewood tea to drink, used embrication oil and held his wounds and in four weeks he began to walk. Now this gentleman had aerosypolis which is blood poisoning and can lead to hallucinations. So he was weak and he was troubled by hallucinations and the farmer remained ill and they did bring him, making a 150 mile journey by wagon with this ill gentleman to bring him here. But just the measures that families would go to to try to take care of someone and then finally saying we've got to get some more help here. And so many times you find that example of families working so hard for so long to keep that family member home and then finally realizing that it just had become too much. On the other hand, you could find examples of let's get rid of this family member as quick as possible. Troublesome. Troublesome or I have a trophy wife lined up and those kinds of things. So as much as we have such a variety of reasons for people to be put in the asylum, and some of them I think we would both agree were extremely questionable. And others. Oh yeah, how about the coal miner who was trying to start a labor union. There you go. Right, into the asylum, yeah, in Nelsonville. One of my favorite stories. Well there were two reasons. The debate in psychiatry and the history of asylums is, did they come about to provide a social good, to provide humanitarian care, or were they there to provide social control? And the answer is both. We have people who truly had mental illness. We had the coal miner trying to start a labor union. We had a daughter who ran off and joined a brothel in Cincinnati and disgraced the family and was brought to the asylum. So women who were truly ill with postpartum depression, brought to the asylum, given some rest, restored, were able to go back to their family. So it's a mix. And this too, I think is something important to understand and that is that many of these people, both the administration and the staff, as well as the families expected these people who became patients, to not be in the asylum for all that terribly long. That they needed asylum. They needed sanctuary. The true word of asylum, the true meaning. Yeah, sanctuary. Now as it turns out, of course there were a number of people who were there for many years, many decades, became institutionalized, if you will, could not operate or function outside of such a controlled situation. There was a lot of coming and going when you look at the records also. Someone would get better, go home, relapse back to the asylum. Oh, I've seen numerous cases. You can find this in the admissions book. In the same name. Yeah, and a lot of times it'll say RE for re-admitted and some of them are six or seven times. But at the same time then released so that they could go back as released as quickly as possible. So it's not as if bring them in and make them stay. The thing I wanted to ask you about was what was your take on those like civil war soldiers that you would come across? Oh yes, there were, I look specifically for examples of commitment documents that would indicate that someone was hospitalized because of post-traumatic stress and indeed they were there. And there were also family members. For example, there were mothers who were there who were just unredeemably depressed because of the loss of the men and their family from the civil war. So absolutely, we have civil war veterans buried in the cemetery and who were hospitalized some were able to leave, some were not. I don't have any credentials to make this statement really, but my feeling has been for a long time that particularly for those first 20 or so years of the asylum, so the asylum opened in January of 1874. So that's only a few years after, well it's not what nine years after the end of the civil war that almost all of the people who were patients there were really veterans of the civil war, be they male or female or staff or patients. But the women would, I'd classify as veterans as well because of their family members having participated in that war. I read of a boy who was 15 and he joined a regiment, he was at Chickamauga, he was at Shiloh, he was all for years and finally he just gave way under the stress of all that and was hospitalized as soon as the asylum opened. Now in the three cemeteries there are up there, there are at least 89 military veterans. They start with the Mexican War and seemed to go as far as at least the First World War and we're finding then that, well I found in some research I was doing two of them were deserters. So the stress apparently of the war itself was enough to make them desert even before the end of the war. Civil war produced presidents and senators and business leaders and it also, some people just, some broke under the stress, so. And then there's Eli Stevens, did you really, did you look into Eli at all? Red is the confederate. The document, yeah. Yeah, there was a guy who was a confederate soldier and imagine what his, he was in there for what, I think 21 years. He was put in the asylum in 1874. Now at that point everybody else in the asylum are union people and either veterans themselves or family members of veterans. I can't imagine that Eli got much sanctuary. Yeah, at the asylum, yeah, in the attendance. Eli, well he was hospitalized for, it's thought that he was part of a member of Morgan's Raiders but we've not really been able to talk about that directly. Yeah, but he was hospitalized because he burned down a church in, was it MacArthur? It's somewhere in Vinton County, yeah. You'd have to be crazy to burn down a church, right? At least they decided, well the trial said he was guilty and insane. Yeah, and insane, yeah. It followed, yeah. So then, okay, one of the things that I've talked about with people, and I'm sure you're much more qualified to talk about this than me, is that all of these various treatments were, they weren't designed as tortures by any means. I mean there was thought behind them that this is going to help people. You mean like the taking the walks or the? Well, I mean that of course, but then some of the other, like the hydrotherapies, the, Right, electrocobalsis shock, lobotomy years. Lobotomy. Bad chapters. Well, electrocobals, the ECT therapy is back and but it's much more controlled and I guess it's used in instances of depression. Lobotomies were shut down after maybe a decade. And the water treatments, some of them sound pleasant, but the needle showers, things like that, had kind of a punitive ring to them. Yeah. Yeah. So even though their intentions were good, these could turn into unfortunate treatments. Well, yeah, I think medicine is psychiatry through 150 years. There are examples here and there. You think of the Tuskegee experiments and so forth. There's all kinds of examples of science gone wrong. Yeah, I've had to wonder. Many of these people are suffering a traumatic shock, which is what brings about the mental distress. And to me, the wonder is, why would you visit shock on to someone who had shock? Wouldn't you go the opposite direction? Yeah. Yeah. And then we had deinstitutionalization and the asylum around the 70s began to be, people were placed in the community. There was a big effort made, social workers and so forth with all the imperatives, the federal imperatives, to deinstitutionalize. And that coincided with the advent of medications, the Rosine came out and then so on. And we had the Community Mental Health Care Act, which was an unfunded mandate. And so we have done as best as we can, since with combination of small mental hospitals, lots of as much community support as possible, combination of medication and therapy is what we have today. Something back to those early years, those first 20 to 30 years. One things we haven't really talked about in detail and we're running out of the formal time here and we want to give you all a chance to ask questions or make comments is the community actions back and forth with the asylum. This is what churches and all kinds of other organizations here in town that had things going on. Oh, there was lots of interaction with the community in addition to all the financial exchanges, all the farmers bringing things to sell, the contracts for the milk, the meat, the coal, everything, the light, gas that kept everything running. There were the pastors and the churches would go up and conduct Sunday services. There was entertainments on Sunday afternoons that the town would be invited to come and people would go up to the concerts and the picnics and so forth. The grounds themselves were a very permeable boundary between the asylum and the community and right away the grounds were used for outings, family outings, picnics, Sunday strolls and so forth and it was just kind of what you did. You went up and took walks and there were patients there on the ground as well so there was an exchange. I'm very much following that idea of Thomas Kirkbride and the Kirkbride plan. Having that buffer, if you will, that's not really a buffer. It's much more of a way for these two communities to have a chance to interact and we have a photograph over here of people ice skating on the ponds and I know a lot of people in town went, well, in the region really, there for picnics and high university students went there to spark and get to know each other along lover's lane. And Athens continues to be an example of a place where mental health, some cutting edge mental health things are taking place which the 19th century moral treatment was cutting edge for the times but we have the diversion program now, we have the crisis training for first responders and how do you respond to someone who is mentally ill rather than just something, a criminal activity. So those are really, the people here in Athens who have generated those programs have been to Washington gotten awards for them. So it's, you know, small place with some important things still going on. Well, now it's called the ridges because it was turned over to Ohio University in 1988. I still think of it as a place for mental health. And every time I'm up there, I see dozens and dozens of people up there walking with their dogs or just by themselves or using the orienteering course or just enjoying the outdoors. All seasons throughout the year. And it really is from mental health. So I got the high. Very restorative. Yeah, very restorative. Yeah, very restorative. I got the high sign. I just got the high sign. So let's turn this over to you all. What kind of questions or comments do you have? Yeah. I'd like to know what period you covered in your patients there or is it entirely up? The dissertation and most of the book is. Let Doug do this for the web people. Repeat that for the web people. So what period were you working with as far as your research? And did you interview any patients there and staff and staff? The book and the dissertation focus on the first 20 years. And so, but in the, and then we have, the book also has an epilogue that goes through the rest of the history. And in that process, I did talk to staff and along the way have met patients as well. And they're cited in the book. Someone on the webcast. But that's a project that needs to be done. It's a lot of oral history that resides, yes. Okay, Doug. Someone on the webcast a little bit earlier asked, were there any noble patients that tried to pass themselves off as doctors and or visitors to escape the grounds, presumably. That you know of. I don't know, but they called them elopements back then. And you would read in the report, we had five patients elope. And they just would leave. You would just walk off the grounds. One of them hopped a train and was last heard from working on a plantation off the Mississippi River. But then they would send people out to go try and fetch them back. But I don't know of anyone who, I don't think it was really necessary to go. You could just leave. You could just walk off. And that's another thing too. The place was never completely enclosed with fencing or anything. There was a fence along Richland Avenue. But I think that was just, that's much more decorative. Ornamental. Yeah, ornamental, yeah. So famous people escaping. Was that part of the question? Passing themselves off. I think, oh, okay. Just as doctors. Or as doctors or whatever. Yeah. There are a couple of cases of doctors who were admitted as patients. Come across that. A lot of people. Your hands higher. Yeah. I did encounter. Were there well-known people? I did encounter some minor well-known people. But the terms of my agreement with the state with that there would be not be any names or note of that. But nobody rich and famous. Just a few local and state notables. Of course, in the law. Oh, that was Billy Milligan, I guess. Yeah, I was just going to say that. That was out of my time period. But that was a whole book. The Lives of Billy Milligan, which you can read. And I would suggest. Someone following up on that online also asked, were there criminally insane inmates or clients or patients there? People who had committed a crime and were mentally ill. Well, yes. Yeah, this is certainly, I don't remember when Lima State Hospital was established. But there are certainly, well, Eli Stevens, one of them we just talked about, was criminally insane. And there were certainly others from Southeast Ohio like that as well. And typically they, I think, would have a little special attention, more higher security. Ruffford behays before he was president as a young lawyer in Cincinnati. One of his first cases, he prided himself in defending a young woman who had done a crime. But she was also determined to be mentally ill. And he was very pleased about that. His brother-in-law went on to be superintendent at Longview Asylum. And he visited here several times this asylum. He was very closely aligned with that. Were there African-Americans? Someone online wonders there? Yes, yes. Hundreds. We know that in many asylums and in many locations, African-Americans were segregated in the asylums or separate asylums were built. We don't know, we don't really know geographically within this asylum how that took place, but there were lots. There were lots. I have never seen anything that actually says that they were segregated. So I'm making the assumption, fair it may not be, but making the assumption that they were not segregated. When you look at photographs of staff, there are a few African-Americans, whether they were strictly to care for other African-Americans or not, I don't know. I can tell you this, because I had seen plenty of evidence to this, that there is no segregation in any of the three cemeteries up there. As a matter of fact, this Eli Johnson, the Confederate, is buried up there and right next to him is a union soldier who was in the 21st United States colored infantry. So I think Israel Johnson was buried there specifically to keep an eye on Eli. Keep that in check. For eternity. Maybe. There was a question right here. When and under what circumstances did all these materials come to Ohio University? To the Mont Center? I don't know, for sure. I think most of the materials came between 1988 and the early 1990s. Before I got here, so I did witness some of that, but those committal papers we were talking about, a lot of the old photographs that we have here, some of the superintendent's material, which would be superintendent's correspondence, administrative documents, including like the employee records, the payrolls, all those things, came directly from the asylum. We like to make noise about that, but we also like to keep it quiet because I think Ohio Historical Society thinks that they really own them. And technically, the Ohio Department of Mental Health does own those records. I mean, we don't own them. They are basically on deposit here. And then we've added things off and on over the years or even in some cases created some things specifically to just compliment the collections we have here. There's one in the back and then we'll get to you. Yes, sir? Biggest hope and biggest fear for conservation, preservation of the material? Of the documents or the ridges itself? You wanna go first on that, talk topic? One of the things that I don't hear about much in all the discussion that we suddenly have are the grounds, which are, when you read the descriptions of them, they're kind of a rare example of some of the most beautiful and varied grounds, natural states here in the county. There are old fields, there are meadows, there are old forests, some very, very old trees. And I don't, we don't hear much about what will become of the grounds. And they're enjoyed by many, many people as a restorative place to visit and walk and exercise and socialize. So I, and there were a major part of the history here. Where the farms were, their vestiges of the orchards and so forth. So I would love to see some of the concern about those grounds and preserving them as they are or even enhancing a little bit, tending them take place. Then they're the buildings. If you look at the master plan, it cause for preservation of the Kennedy and one wing out from there, as well as the buildings that have been renovated, which are the old cottages, the cottage style that were built, where the Boynovich Center is now. And then the rest would be converted to parking, a new stair step building that would go down where the, we're building 20 is now. So there does stand a master plan that was approved a few years ago. Someone online asked if any of these records have been digitized or if they've been computerized and cataloged that sort of thing. I'll say one thing. I do know when I was at the State Library of Ohio that they are beginning, some years ago began a process of digitizing all the annual reports of all the asylums. That'll be fabulous when that happens, but it's not done yet. Yeah, man, we won't have to. Yeah. We don't have a whole lot of annual reports anyway, but I think those are really great resources. As far as what we're doing with things, we cannot digitize the committal papers because they are confidential by state law. So why bother digitizing them if nobody can, or very few people can really look at them. I should mention with that though that there is now a process where if people learn that they have an ancestor who was in the asylum and can fill out some paperwork that we will provide for them to fill out, and then we can release to them copies of those committal papers if we have them. So that's become something very helpful to a lot of people who are doing genealogy, but also for people who have concerns about perhaps genetic disorders within their family and unfortunately they're not gonna learn much from these papers because something that says severe melancholia, well, what does that really mean today? I mean, it has a meaning. It just has an updated term for it, but it's not really, so we don't have patient records. We have these committal papers, and frankly a lot of those can be accessed in any of the counties in the state. What has been digitized are the, there are a lot of images. If you go to the digital collections of Alden Library, there are many, many, especially the 1893 set that went to the World's Fair, the photographs of the grounds, those have been digitized and are available online. So we had to also then be careful about digitizing anything else that would have mentioned the patient's name. In that process, if we decided to try to digitize some of those records, you would have to redact all of those names out of there that's very labor-intensive, so therefore very expensive to do. So the chances of us doing a whole lot there in digitizing records is relatively slim. I can say this though, that we are working this year, one of sort of my major focuses is to help put together some websites. One website will very specifically look at the cemeteries. I've spent some years now identifying all of the people buried in all of those cemeteries, even the 1700 plus people who are buried under just numbers. And then we're also talking about a much bigger picture of doing a massive website on the entire complex so that you could zoom in on a certain building and click on it, bring up pictures, bring up whatever other kinds of records we might have about that building. So this is gonna be a long-term project, but I'm really looking forward to it. Yes, Charlie. Well, the only thing I'm gonna say is I had, I was a department head there one of these days. Oh. Yeah. I had a lot of artifacts closed down to us almost immediately. I think there was discussion about what the departmental health, the historical society and so forth were going to, but I couldn't take even bookcases and things like that that I'd had there for years and thought that they preserved that stuff almost immediately, not knowing what they were gonna do with it or anything like that, but they didn't let it walk out of there. Yeah. Or at least not hospital employees. There was some discussion about you employees walking off with the artifacts out of there. Yeah. There was an auction at one point, I think in the 70s maybe of a lot of the things too. So. Yeah. And I'm always, we are always interested in records. Now artifacts, pieces of furniture and so forth, that's a little beyond what we as an archiver are really all about, but records, kinds of things, photographs, all that kind of stuff. So if, I had a lot of stuff. So you need to find out where they are now so we can get ahold of them. I'm probably gonna tell your president something. That could be. Okay. I hope you have. I hope you have. We might. Well, take a look. It's early. One thing I'd like to say to Catherine, I've said this to her over the telephone, but I'd like to publicly thank her. She made a very nice reference in the book about my grandmother, Marcella Harding Creed. She was famous for being such a compassionate woman and she would have birthday parties for the patients. And she was talking about myths to dispel and earlier in her talk. And one thing that I know was true, they used to have an alligator in a fountain in front of the main building and kept it in water, in a circular fountain. And in the wintertime, when it was too cold to have it out for the patients to be entertained by it, it would be put in the basement. And I just wish that Dennis Powell was here tonight. He wrote a rather scathing thing in the Athens news. And believe me, this place needs to be preserved. It's a treasure. And I'm just sorry that the younger people just don't realize what a great place it was. Welcome. I have, there's a picture of the alligator and also a picture of where they kept the alligator in the wintertime, right over here, so. Well. An opinion on the recent demolition of building 26. Well, what's done is done. It's gong. Although it's not gone entirely, I hike up there a lot and learn that all the masonry and tile and concrete have been ground up and spread on the road that leads up to radar hill. So when you go walk up there now, we're walking on those remnants of building 26. Well, the more buildings that are taken down, the more you lose the very unique resource that is here, which is 150 year record of the history of psychiatry through its architecture. You have the moral treatment, you have the cottage style, you have the 50, all the way up to the 1950s and the 1960s. So you just have less and less of a complete, complete historical perspective on the ground. Very, I don't, hardly anywhere else in the United States is such a complete and taken care of facility. One of these hospitals exist. The Kirkbrot hospitals were built in just about every state of the union, probably close to 100 of them across the United States. Many of these, it is sad to see some buildings torn down. At the same time, think about the challenge that the university or the community has in trying to preserve the buildings and the grounds for that matter. It takes money and it takes lots and lots of money. And it takes purpose too. You have to have some reason to do something with those buildings. The original construction was very hardy. I've been told it will probably last another 150 years, but it's very expensive to renovate. All the load bearing walls so close together. Well, I'll go up here to the Kennedy Museum and look at the depth of the window sills like that. Okay, well, we're gonna need to bring this up to code. So let's drill holes through here to put in new electric. And you have to have a drill bit at least this long and pay it some crew of people. It'll take a month to do all that. Why can't you just, I was part of this sort of renovate a new hospital to be built. And it was really prohibitively expensive for people to talk about renovating that hospital and bringing it in. But that was the first thing that was discussed was to preserve it and to renovate it. And that just... Thinking of all the code standards, it must have been just... Yeah, well, there was asbestos. Asbestos, there's lead. And it just wasn't possible to do that. Now, at the same time, I don't want anybody to think that I'm advocating, knock the whole place down. I think that you really ought to be preserved as much as possible or as best as possible. But until you can have utility for those buildings, what are you gonna do with them? And money, yeah. And the money to do it. Then you just have to muckball them. And that's what the university has been forced to do for, well, for many years with a lot of those buildings. And done a beautiful job with the Kennedy and the Memorial Auditorium and the Boinevich Center buildings. Although I saw a really bug hole in the roof when I was up there last week giving a tour. Did you really? Yeah, it's a big one now. I heard about that. It's like the size of a king-size mattress or something. I mean, it's... So let's all chip in and get some blue tarps. It helps or whatever. Because it really is a treasure. And that's the buildings. But I think your point is very well taken. That's 740 plus acres up there that was turned over to Ohio University. Doubling the size of the university here in Athens. 700 some acres here on the main campus and now out there as well. And while there are things going on out there like the orienteering and the land labs and a lot of other things, there's a lot of other things that could be done and a lot of other projects that could be done. Simple, easy, cheap, buy students, student organizations, student groups and community people as well. It would help at least preserve the ground. Maintain the trails and... Yeah, maintaining trails and all that kind of thing. And I can't emphasize this enough. It is a wonderful place for your own mental health just to go up there and wander around. And I've seen faces I know do that, so... If you go to cemetery one, there's always a well supplied set of brochures that mark the walks, the different walks that are up there. So you can just get a brochure and take a 30 minute or an hour, a two hour walk up there. So you can still go up there and spark. So we have another question from our webcast. Someone is wondering if you give tours, if someone gives tours of the grounds occasionally? Yeah, I'm available for tours. I think... Tom Walker gives tours. You can contact Tom Walker through... George Ebert gives tours. George Ebert is an employee here at Ohio University. Tom Walker is a retired political science professor. Probably the easiest way to contact him would be through the Athens chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mental Illness. For the mentally ill. For mental illness, yeah. Or for mental illness, okay. And that could be Googled very easily and you can find Tom's name. I've given tours. I'm not sure who else. I'll do one if there's some people. I've done for third graders or middle school kids. You can tailor it to however. Well, we've done the Ohio University Alumni Association sponsors Hayrides at Homecoming. And Catherine and I and George and Tom have been the tour guides for those. You can go through the Historical Society. George will do tours. Oh, okay. Good, good. So yeah, there are tours. The last one I gave was last week and that was two and a half hours. I don't know if you really want me all the time. Although they said they liked it. So let's hope that they did. Any other questions from the audience? Yes. The warrior system of institutions or facilities for mentally retarded citizens whose families could not walk or take care of them. Were there facilities for the mentally retarded as well? At that time, no. Well, very soon there was, in Columbus, there was an institution for what was called then the feeble minded. But as far as when I read the records and the case admissions documents, it appeared that this asylum here was also a place where people were admitted, developmental disabilities. And that could include, like you mentioned earlier, epilepsy, the very first female patient. She was? 11-year-old child with epilepsy. Did you hear that? 11-year-old child. Little girl, yeah. Anybody else? Yeah. Very quickly, the asylum leadership decided to start a farm. And it grew and grew and grew. By the 1950s in the annual reports, you would read and say that we have three main purposes to take care of our patients, to give advice to people who are not our patients, and our agricultural enterprise. There was just a really well-developed, robust agricultural enterprise. Vegetables, fruits, the beef cattle, the pigory, poultry, milk, you name it. The dairy operation. The dairy operation, yes. This is the, this is the, this is the, this is the dairy barn, this is the 100th, 100th. It wasn't entirely self-sustaining because you could see that where they were still having to buy some things. And also they would trade if, say, the asylum in Columbus had extra potatoes, and there were more apples here that they would swap back and forth. So there was a really large agricultural enterprise. Patients work there, staff work there. What you see is, like, is there is an evolution with treatments and an evolution with training of people and so forth. There's also an evolution within the asylum as it's, whether it can be self-sustaining or not. It never really was fully self-sustaining. And it would ebb and flow as to how much they could produce on their own. If it was a bad year for tomatoes, well, you'd have to. Right, yeah. And in the very beginning, they didn't really have a power plant, and then they were buying power from here in Athens. They were buying milk and eggs and all that kind of thing. So really, the businesses around town found that to be extremely important, including the local stationery store and all of those kinds of things. So there was quite a back and forth going. Now, up until the early 1960s, that asylum was the largest employer in all of Athens County and was only eclipsed by Ohio University by the mid-1960s. So it was really the most important institution devoted to the mind in this area. This place was of secondary importance for most of the existence of the asylum or most of the existence of this university for that matter. We are going to archive the video for this, and we'll have it on our website within a few days. So you can recommend this to other folks if they're interested, and all of our guests online as well. If you're interested in some of the special collections at Alden Library, we have some brochures on a table over here. And you're more than welcome to have these. Some interesting things here in Athens at Alden Library and the Mons Center. Catherine Ziff, Doug McKay, thank you very much for being with us on Authors at Alden. Thank you.