Medfield Insane Asylum

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In a recent blog post about the New Orleans City Asylum, a reader commented about an abandoned asylum here in Massachusetts. The asylum contains, among other things, a cemetery in which many of the patients who spent their lives in the care of this asylum were buried. I woke up before sunrise this morning and headed out to Medfield for a look. I needed to experience the place for myself.

The Medfield Insane Asylum was created in 1892 by an act of the Massachusetts State Legislature. At its height, the asylum held over 2,200 patients supervised and cared for by between 500-900 staff members. Built in the Greek Revival, Queen Anne, and Beaux Arts styles, the 58 buildings scattered on 900 acres of rolling green land a self-contained institution. The facility had it's own power generation, heat, water, and sewage systems. The patients raised their own livestock and produce.

Major institutions of the era were built in the Kirkbride style--patients and administration were housed in one large building. Intended to offer humane treatment for those in need, Kirkbride style buildings worked toward changing public perception of "lunatics" who were generally locked in prisons and alms houses. The newer hospitals were meant to treat the insane in a more natural environment away from the pollution and hectic life in the city. Medfield was to be a different kind of institution. When the doors of the asylum were opened in 1896 it was the first in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to be built on the cottage plan.

The cottage plan gained popularity during the end of the 19th century. The Kirkbride buildings were becoming overcrowded and dangerous places. The doctors of the time found that the Kirkbride buildings lacked proper facilities for patients who were noisy and violent. The cottage style, which continued to be popular through the 20th century, was move away from large institutions into more home-like environments.

The plan generally consisted of multiple paired buildings (segregated by sex and patient type) surrounding a central core of administration, recreation, worship, and treatment buildings. At  Medfield, the "cottages" mimicked the home environment--sleeping quarters were on the second floor and sitting and work rooms were on the first floor.

Unfortunately, as suggested by the article to the left, life could still be a dangerous and violent place at the asylum.

A newspaper article describes the early set up of the asylum.

At first, the staff worked on the wards and lived with the patients, usually sleeping in the attics of the buildings were they worked. For a time inmate death rate averaged four per week... Farming took place on the hundereds of acres of land surrounding the campus. A farmhouse was built across Canal Street in 1901. It served as living quarters for the head farmer and his family as well as 14 farm hands and 30 patients... farming was stopped in the late 1960s... There were also between 6-10 emotionally distrubed children admitted to the facility; the youngest just 4-years old. 

I located annual reports for the first 23 years of the hospital's operation. I'm going to spend some time with the documents over the next few weeks and write a future blog post about them. For now here are a few highlights:

From the Trustee's Report

The doors opened to the Medfield Asylum in 1896. Due to overcrowding in other state asylums, the State Board of Lunacy and Charity transferred "about 600 patients of the chronic and incurable class... from the various hospitals for the insane" to the newly built asylum. The Superintendent, Dr. Edward French, made $2,500; Assistant Physican Dr. Charles A. Drew made $1,500; Assistant Physican Thomas Howell made $900; Steward John B. Chapin made $12,200; Engineer Arthur e. Read made $1,000, Bookkeeper Sue R. Haynes made $600; Treasurer Charles C. Blaney made $500; and Matron Mary R. Satterwaite made $450.

From the Superintendent's Report

The world of cleaning, furnishing and otherwise preparing the different buildings was begun March 1, and was pushed forward as rapidly as possible. Twelve of the cottages for patients were ready to be put in order while six others designed for the filthy and more disturbed classes were in process of erection. 

Let's take a look at the occupations of the first 600 patients of the asylum:

Now let's take a look at the chief complaint of those six hundred people who were the first to call the Medfield Asylum home. Note the variety of complaints that would lead to life long commitment to an insane asylum such as epilepsy, influenza, masturbation, menopause, disappointment, and domestic affliction.

The last patients left Medfield State Hospital on April 3, 2003. Here is some of what is left behind.

Check out my next blog post, We Too Have Lived, to learn more about the Medfield Hospital Cemetery that is tucked away behind the old asylum property. 

Slave Narratives: Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

It looks like I'm going to be a regular visitor to the digital archives at the Library of Congress. Did you know they have a collection of oral histories taken in the 1930s by people employed by the WPA (Works Progress Administration)? They make for riveting, harrowing, and enlightening reading.

Personal narratives like this are like opening a little tiny window in the fabric of time. Through that window I get to glance back and see an unvarnished, unprocessed, and unadorned view of life at it was. These windows are irresistible--when I find it I need to open it and look through it. Whether it be historical narratives likes these, or more contemporary narratives like the ones told by patients in my office, I'm transfixed. Each window opened gives me another perspective to understand the complex fabric of our shared experience.

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves was born sometime around 1850 somewhere near Louisville. She told her story to a WPA interviewer in 1937. The nameless interviewer wrote this of Sarah:

"Her life story is one of contrasts; contrasts of thought; contrasts of culture, beneficial inventions and suffrage. Not far from her home the glistening streamlined Zephyr speeds on twin rails beside the Missouri River, near the route of the slow-moving, creaking wagons on the ox-road of the 1850s."

Let's open up one of those tiny little windows in the fabric of time and let Sarah speak.

"My name is Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, or Aunt Sally as everybody calls me. Yes'm that's a lot of name an' I come by it like this, My husband was owned by a man named Graves, and I was owned by a man named Shaw, so when we were freed we took the surnames of our masters. I was born march 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right now. I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had alloted her to a man named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes." 

"Yes'm. Allotted? Yes'm. i'm goin' to explain that," she replied. "you see there was slave traders in those days, jes' like you got horse and mule an' auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired 'em out. Ye'm, rented 'em out. Allotted means somthin' like hired out. But the slave never got no wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the master." 

"I was never sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. yes'm when a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest. A chattel mortgage." 

A down payment!! 

"Times don't change, just the merchandise." 

I am amazed at how connected I feel to Sarah. Despite having been born more than seventy years before I was, and having died on July 3, 1943, when my grandparents were in their early 20s and neither of my parents were born, I can feel her presence here in my living room as I sit on my couch writing this in an undisclosed location in the Merrimack River Valley. That's the power of a personal narrative.

Sarah gives us a glimpse into the life of a person in slavery that we don't read about in history text books. Her personal story gives contour, shape, and texture to the disembodied facts our teachers lecture about. Sarah also offers us so much more. She was a simple woman. She worked hard and struggled to survive through an era of history that was not kind to people of color. She received no formal education, won no prizes, and left no inventions, books, or other intellectual products behind.

Yet reading her narrative, I'm incredibly moved the the gifts I have received. Sarah mattered not for what she left behind. She mattered because she was here. Her story illuminates her humanity that, in the end, is all we ever really have.

What Even Happened to Liberal Arts?

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Regular readers of my blog might remember an earlier post that I wrote upon discovering the Library of Congress digital archives. I recently went back for another visit to the archives and pulled up a treasure trove of interesting things.

To the left is one of the images I collected. What caught my eye is the government offering free adult education classes in the liberal arts. Can you imagine that happening now?

Back in 1937 it did happen. Under the auspices of the WPA (Works Projects Administration), interested adults in Chicago would sign up and learn all sorts of interesting things . Stop for a moment and think about that: adults signing up to learn more about the world around them. Art appreciation, perhaps. How about a new language? A painting class? Child development? All were likely possibilities in addition to basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I'd like to imagine it was a time where people had the opportunity to be both thoroughly grounded in basic skills (reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking) and be exposed to a diversity of thoughts to indulge curiosity and wonder. This is at least my romanticized version of history.

What are things like now? Less curiosity and wonder. That's for sure.

If you have some extra time, and are curious, check out this Frontline episode about some of the perils of for-profit higher education institutions. You might also be interested in this New York Times article that details the fraud charges the Department of Justice filed against one for profit higher education institution.

Watch College Inc. on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

John Is Not Really Dull: WPA Posters from the 1930s

Sometimes the Internet allows one to get a little carried away. Take this evening for example. I discovered website of the Library of Congress. Who knew they had a rather sizable collection of digitized images of our shared American history. I've spent the wee-hours of the morning looking at their images of old WPA posters. 

For those of you who don't know, the WPA was (prior to 1939) the Words Progress Administration and (after to 1939) later called the Work Projects Administration. It was one of the most ambitions parts of the New Deal--designed to employ millions of out-of-work Americans during the depression. Among other things, the WPA built public buildings and roadways, lead various art and educational projects, and helped feed, shelter, and clothe children.

Look carefully around your town. There are likely still structures near you that were built by the WPA. The program spent over a billion dollars a year on these projects--providing jobs for unemployment men and women. In the process, the face of the country was changed.

My favorite remnants of these projects are the posters. The images provide such a great glimpse what was important and talked about in this era. Here we have a poster encouraging parents to get eye examinations for their children. The poster was sponsored by the town of Hempstead in 1937. For more information about it, check out the reference at the Library of Congress.

John here might really be struggling in school because he can't see--not because he is dull. It's interesting to think for a moment about what message the past is giving to us in this graphic image. How many people were labeled as "dull" because they needed corrective lenses? How many people failed to live up to their full potential?

How did we care for children, anyway? If this public awareness poster produced by a WPA artist is any suggestion, we needed a little attention to child care. As the poster points out, babies can't go on strike. What does this image tell you about how babies were thought about. This somewhat alien looking creature with a very unhappy expression is called an "it" on the poster. It depends on your care. When this poster was created in 1939 were babies its? Were they seen as creatures that needed to be tamed (or ignored) and left to grow on their own? Check out the reference if you want more information about this particular image.

Moving from dull children and alien looking babies, some of the messages delivered to American's sound rather modern and familiar. This poster, published in 1938, appeared somewhere in Ohio. I know Yellow Stone was created in 1872. I never really thing of a conservation movement as having happened until the 60s. I'm wrong about that. Here we have an image asking Ohio residents to save trees--and in particular the Buckeye tree with is the state tree. There reference for this image is here.

I'll leave you all with a few more images to think about. What do they tell you about this era of history. How is the government communicating with us now? Is it? Should it?

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