Insane asylum cemetery: Forgotten stories

• The county built the asylum in 1889. Such places were intended as humane alternatives to poorhouses and jails.
• Desolate lives and deaths were often the fate of people with mental illnesses %u2014 real or supposed %u2014 in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• In December 1943%2C 10 employees and ex-employees alleged they%27d witnessed abuse at the asylum.

Editor's note:

A community group is working to create a memorial at a forgotten cemetery where 133 people who were committed to the former Outagamie County Asylum for the Chronic Insane are buried.

Burials at the county-owned site — near Fox Valley Technical College's Grand Chute campus — took place between 1891 and 1943. Post-Crescent Media reporter Jim Collar continues to update readers on the group's efforts. For further context, we're re-publishing a story by former P-C reporter Susan Squires that originally appeared May 7, 2007.

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A 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl are among the 140 people buried west of a road Fox Valley Technical College uses to teach truck driving.

No flowers or headstones mark the graves, just deliberately arranged rows of trees and a sign: "Outagamie County Insane Asylum Cemetary 1891-1943."

The boy had epilepsy and died of a seizure. According to the cemetery log — the only record of the girl's existence — she entered the asylum when she was 10 and is buried in plot No. 14.

Somewhere in the graveyard rests a farm worker whose family committed him for alcoholism in 1897, when he was 25. He died at the asylum of a heart attack when he was 72, anonymous in life as well as death. In county records, he is listed as "John Doe." Under the heading "What relative, if any, should take charge of the body," Doe's chart says, "None."

Desolate lives and deaths were often the fate of people with mental illnesses — real or supposed — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Decades later, the hard-to-find cemetery and the records of the people buried there remain a testament to that cold reality.

Tim DeBruin worked as volunteer coordinator in the 1980s for Outagamie County Health Center, a successor of the asylum. It was his first job out of college. More than 20 years later, what he read in the asylum superintendent's log still haunts him.

"Back then, it was a one-way street. You were admitted and you never left," said DeBruin, who now works for School Specialty. "The relatives died, or moved away, and you were forgotten. They were just forgotten."

Humane alternative

The county built the asylum in 1889. Such places were intended as humane alternatives to poorhouses and jails. The county was so proud of the institution that its image decorated postcards.

The facility's first two superintendents were former members of the county board. They ran the place under the direction of other board appointees, whose primary responsibility was paying bills. The superintendents' wives served as matrons. A doctor came once a week to tend "inmates" with basic health services and to sign death certificates.

In the early years, the only way most people left the asylum was in a casket. Entering, however, was considerably less difficult. Unusual behavior was reason enough for a man to deliver his wife into institutional hands. "Excessive use of tobacco," "domestic difficulties," "desertion by husband" and "poverty and neglect" are listed among the reasons for commitment.

Louise P. was 36 when she arrived at the asylum in 1897. The diagnosis was "uterine trouble." She died there of a stroke 40 years later. Her unclaimed body lies in asylum cemetery plot No. 110.

Mary L. entered the asylum in 1919. According to the superintendent's log, she'd given birth to her third child a month earlier. Her other two had died in infancy. She never again saw the outside of the asylum, where she died of tuberculosis in 1932.

"Can you imagine, 35 to 50 years of your life spent in a place like that?" said Karen Aspenson, executive director of NAMI Fox Valley, the local affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

"There really wasn't anything much that could be offered to them, and it was barbaric what we did do," she said. "The history of psychiatric treatment is not a pretty one."

Mistreatment of patients

In December 1943, 10 employees and ex-employees alleged they'd witnessed abuse at the asylum. Patients, they said, were forced to remain seated in rows of chairs for hours on end and subjected to cold baths. The workers described an incident in which attendants dragged a woman down the hall by her hair and punched an elderly patient in the face because he wouldn't stop talking.

An investigation substantiated most of the claims, and further found that the superintendent himself had beaten a patient with a strap. Also, investigators said, patients were poorly fed. Partly because the trustees were so intent on turning a profit, they sold food from the county farm, where inmates were forced to work, rather than direct it to the asylum. Two employees lost their jobs and the asylum's superintendent, matron, doctor and dentist resigned.

Drugs like Thorazine and changes in the law began to revolutionize mental health care in the mid-1950s. The institution changed its name accordingly, from Outagamie County Asylum for the Chronic Insane to Outagamie County Hospital to Outagamie County Health Center and then to the modern incarnation, Brewster Village, a sunny nursing home with private rooms.

Cemetery overgrown

Probably, the fact they were buried on the institution's grounds suggests that asylum residents' relationships with their families ended at the asylum door, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh professor Thomas Ebert reasons. About half came from outside Outagamie County, and most came from poor families.

"It would seem logical to assume that if there had been some level of contact and an ongoing relationship with family members, they would be likely to be involved in the final arrangements of their loved ones," Ebert wrote in his book, "A Social History of the Asylum."

Even so, headstones apparently marked at least some of the cemetery's graves. In a March 22, 1978 memo to the Outagamie County Historical Society, health center employee John Franklin reported that he had removed the only remaining tombstone a few months earlier. It was broken and leaning against a tree.

By the 1990s, the cemetery had become so unrecognizable as such there was talk of putting a service road through the property. Outagamie County Executive Toby Paltzer, whose father once farmed the land around the cemetery, heard about it and stopped construction before it began.

"I said, 'You can't do that. There are people buried back there,'" Paltzer said. "Nobody knew it was there. You should have seen their faces when I told them."

About four years ago, members of the FVTC Honor Guard, who drill on the road beside the cemetery, decided to restore the property. They cleaned it up, erected a sign and installed a walkway for a man who used to visit in his wheelchair.

Their adviser, FVTC fire protection instructor Terry Linson, said the group is trying to raise money for beautification projects, like a decorative fence.

"People still come there, so when they visit they can come to a maintained cemetery," Linson said.

Some day, the college students would even like to place markers on the graves, using the cemetery records.

However, they will not be able to locate John Doe. His grave wasn't even assigned a number.

Among those buried in the cemetery

August N.: Born in Germany, he was admitted Dec. 20, 1890, at age 17 for "aftereffects of scarlet fever." According to the superintendent's log, his symptoms began at age 5. He died of pneumonia in 1933. He is buried in grave No. 103.

Agnes J.: The Brown County sheriff delivered her to the asylum in 1917 with a note: "15 years. Polish. No education. Catholic. Financial condition very poor." According to asylum records, she was "feebleminded," "mentally deficient," "crippled" and suffered from seizures. She died of apoplexy when she was 16. She lies in grave No. 81.

Charles M.: A 44-year-old Finnish immigrant with a wife and three children. According to the asylum record, he was admitted in 1921 suffering from "dementia praecox." When he died of a heart attack nine years later, the asylum superintendent sent this telegram to his family: "Charles died wire collect disposition of body." It came back addressee unknown. He is buried in grave No. 100.