(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Illinois stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency and by the support of viewers like you.

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- Hello, welcome to "Illinois Stories."

I'm Mark McDonald in Jacksonville in Community Park at the Korean Veterans Memorial.

This wasn't always a veterans memorial.

At one point, this was the fountain in front of the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane back in the 19th century.

It's a very interesting story.

There's not much left here, but there's enough left here, relics and remnants, to make it interesting.

And Dr. Joe Squillace wrote a book about this.

I don't know how you got so involved but you were teaching at McMurray at the time and you found out that there were some remnants of the old hospital here and it got your interest.

You also found out that there wasn't much written about the first state hospital for the insane.

So now your book's done and now you know it all right?

(laughing) - That's right, that's right.

And in fact, one of the places that we will look at is called a Potter's field, a cemetery.

It was really looking there with 238 people buried without any head markers that I thought about how history is really written by those who have the resources to tell it.

And yet the marginalized and vulnerable of society don't have their stories necessarily told.

And I think we're seeing through history and historians writing about sort of a revision and a rethinking about all the different members that made up society.

And so I felt there was an opportunity here to tell the story about the formerly insane or mentally ill throughout Illinois that ended up here in this institution.

- Most people in Jacksonville are probably aware of this but not many outside Jacksonville, but this was the first Illinois State Hospital and they called it, "For the Insane."

That's what it was formerly called.

They located it here, it was a struggle in some cases to get it located here.

Of course, not everybody wants an institution in their town but they got it here and it stayed in one form or another until the 2000s.

- That's correct and the original statutory authority was in 1847.

It was a political battle to get it here.

There were some local civic leaders that really bonded together.

There were medical doctors at Illinois College that were big proponents as well and had experience already working with the insane.

And so there are a combination of factors that ultimately landed it here and it took four years to build it, but finally in 1851, they let the first patients in.

- It was a huge complex too.

We're gonna see as we go through this program, 'cause you've been able to find enough images and photographs and sketches of the time to give you a sense of how big it was.

But as I said, we're standing where the fountain was.

This would have been at the entrance to the main building.

And if we look off to our, I guess this is the west, isn't it doc?

Am I looking west here from- - South.

- South, okay.

As we look south, you see this huge field here and that's where the main building would have been.

- That's correct.

And so this little street here in front of us would have been where the horse and buggy carriages would have dropped off the patients who would have been sent here by family members.

It wasn't necessarily their choice.

It was a court ordered...

It was court ordered that they would be patients of the hospital.

And then across the street, the main building stood with four stories and then four separate wings that came off of this main building.

And then directly in back towards the street would have been the wash house and boiler house where they laundered patients' clothes.

To the left in the back corner, was a 2.5 million gallon reservoir which was built in 1862.

They had originally only had four wells and two cisterns for what was supposed to be for 300, 250, 300 patients.

It wasn't enough so Dr. McFarland, after he came on, he pointed out the patients were not bathing.

He pointed out that the sewage was not being passed through.

They had 30 typhoid cases.

So he called up his friend, Dorothy Dix.

She came out to Springfield and the Illinois legislature got a $67,000 appropriation.

And then he brought in engineers from Chicago to divert water from this local Mauvaisterre Creek and fill the 2.5 million gallon reservoir.

In front of that was a bowling alley which was a way for patients to destress.

Part of the role of the institution was to help patients destress from the stressors in their environment.

That was part of the belief of what was causing insanity.

So there was a bowling alley.

And then off further to the right, at the turn of the century, they built a 14 million gallon reservoir because at the turn of the century there were somewhere between, on a daily basis, 1,500 to 2,000 patients.

- Wow.

- Plus an additional 730 employees.

So this is a pretty massive operation and why they needed- - Wow.

Like 2,500 people at any given time.

- That's correct.

- That's amazing.

- So it was a pretty large reservoir.

There are some sad stories of patient suicides in the reservoir.

One got frozen in the water for 30 days and they were still drinking some of the water.

So you have those stories as well as positive stories of people being served here.

There's a Potter's field, there were some greenhouses as well.

There were extensive farms where they grew crops and then those farms helped feed the patients in the kitchens here, but also they could sell the surplus and some of that revenue helped keep the tax appropriation a bit lower for the state of Illinois.

- And the patients were also farmers, if they wished, if they wanted to be.

- They could participate if the doctor approved.

- And it was on the same grounds, the farms were.

And then off in that same direction, we see that that's where the present, what was the developmental center and also part of this complex, those buildings are still there, but they weren't there, of course, in the early 1900s.

- Correct, those are, in my estimation, built 1940s and later.

And those are the ones that are still sort of sitting abandoned at this point.

And those were, at that point, had changed names from the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane, to, in 1870, the Central Illinois Hospital for the Insane because the Northern hospital was in Kankakee and the Southern hospital was an Anna.

And then eventually it became known as the Jacksonville State Hospital when the others like Bartonville and the Peoria State Hospital were built.

And then it became known as the Jacksonville Developmental Center.

- And off in this direction, there is a field that's still as it was then.

There's a softball or baseball field and the patients used that, didn't they?

- [Joe] That's correct.

There's the original, what stands now as the baseball field, you can see it through the trees, was the original baseball field that patients played on, we think starting around the 1870s.

And so there was a patient team for a little while.

They also played all sorts of athletic activities.

There's pictures of them playing tug of war.

There was a ladies basketball team and tennis team that played out here.

There were lawns, gardening crews.

These were big shade trees for the times when they needed to cool off 'cause the buildings got too hot.

- [Mark] And Joe, people that drive through this park see those bandstands and they're sort of a milestone here in Community Park, but those been there a long time and they were used by the patients, weren't they?

- That's correct.

So there was a big woodworking shop here and the patients actually built those.

There's two here visibly in the park and there's one at a heritage museum just down the road which was at one point placed in the Smithsonian.

So there's some evidence of a patient band but it was primarily an employee bland and the employees entertained the patients and they also brought in bands from the local Jacksonville region.

Some of the more famous bands, the Grierson Band and some big orchestras.

So they would come on and entertain the patients.

And some of the patients might've been given permissions to go sit out in the yard and listen but there's also some stories of them just peering out through the iron bars of their windows trying to be entertained by the band as well.

So the beauty and the sadness of the humanity of living with the insanity, later called mental illness at the time.

- Yeah, what really got your interest and what made you wanna write this book was when you found out about that Potter's field where more than 200 people are buried.

So let's go take a look.

- Sounds great.

- [Mark] Okay, Joe, we're on the southwest portion of the property here, and this is where it came to your attention when you were at McMurray that this was a burial ground over here.

- Yeah, in fact, a colleague of mine at McMurry College said, "You have to go check this out.

It's just a big field where people are buried."

And so this is the original Potter's field where people who died at the institution between 1851 and 1870 were buried.

The normal practice was when someone died, the family would come pick the body up and take it home to either the family plot on the farm or the local church cemetery.

But a lot of folks didn't either have family or the family didn't want to take them back and so they would wheel the body out here and bury them in this field.

- Yeah, and they weren't even marked, it was just a Potter's field, wasn't it?

- That's correct.

- In fact, this is new because there was a wooden marker here, wasn't there, which explained why this field was here.

- [Joe] Yes.

There was just sort of a tattered, old Immanuel North Cemetery marker as well as the historical marker and this obelisk here.

And a week after my book was published, this new cemetery marker stone popped up.

So nice sort of result, hopefully, of trying to tell the story of people who were long forgotten.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

It is a very sad thing that more than 200 souls would not have been taken care of in a better way than just to be brought out here in a mass grave.

It's a sad, sad statement.

- That's true.

What's fascinating is that there are both stories of, they treated people humanely, including buried them humanely.

They often would get a local minister from Jacksonville to come and perform a ceremony and some of the patients and employees would help bury them there.

And then there's also some scarier stories of the past, where, for example, the first patient who died, her name was Martha Fisher, she was a native American, she had spent time at the poor house and they sent her over to the sane asylum.

Well, at the time they had wood-burning stoves still in the patient's rooms and her nightgown caught on fire from some of the ambers from the wood-burning stove and she burned, she suffered for six hours and then she died.

What's interesting is then, after her burial here, I dug up some information where the report to the state was that she died of consumption which is the 19th century term for tuberculosis.

So, possibly some cover ups as well, you know.

And that was not uncommon of state hospitals because they were trying to establish themselves as recognizable hospitals in competition with the medical profession.

But they were trying to really establish themselves that way.

- My goodness.

That is sad.

Somebody didn't want to take responsibility so they just... She was dead, she was crazy, so let's just say this about her.

- Exactly.

- Oh, man.

While we're here, this is a very interesting field, but while we're here, just over to our west there, we'll see that this is a huge smokestack and you can't hardly miss that.

That was an important building, wasn't it?

- [Joe] Yeah, so it's my understanding it was built around 1940 and it was the coal power plant which powered all the buildings here on the campus.

- Joe, your book is titled, "The Untold Story," and you do have some that you've stumbled across in your research, didn't you, that people really are not aware of.

And we were talking about burials earlier.

One of them is the fact that a reverend would come and would bury somebody from the institution and it wasn't uncommon, but in this particular case, the story that you're gonna tell us, there was a reason why the Reverend wanted to halt and do it a different way.

- Yeah, and a Jacksonville Courier reporter came across this story and wrote all about it.

So it was in the newspapers, which is how I came across it.

A gentlemen at the insane asylum had passed away later part of the 19th century, so late 1800s.

And there was a burial going on and a Reverend was performing the ceremony there for the burial and he saw some individuals from the insane asylum come with a body to bury.

And he said, "Hey."

He stopped his ceremony, he said, "Tell me who that is."

And they said his name was George or William Putnam.

He had two names.

And the Reverend said, "Wait a minute, he's a Civil War veteran.

We cannot just throw him in the ground.

We have to give him a proper burial and place him with the veterans."

And so he finished up his ceremony.

They had no pallbearers or anything.

He asked the guys, young guys who were helping him with the current ceremony, to go help him with Mr. Putnam.

And they went over and they gave him a proper burial.

The Jacksonville reporter was so distraught, he was like, "How can we just bury these heroes of our Civil War in the ground," like the cemetery where we're at, "With no markers and nothing signifying their status?"

And so he basically cursed the town and said, "There will be a ghost or specter that will haunt this town for doing that."

And that's also what is sort of beautiful about these stories is that Jacksonville has such a rich history.

And the people, there's lots of civic leadership in this town and the people really cared with all the different institutions, the insane asylum, the poor house, the deaf school, the blind and visually impaired school.

all the institutions that served people are beautiful institutions that did great things for people and yet, at the same time, we do hear some of these sad stories and that juxtaposition is part of the history of this town.

- When the first Illinois State Hospital for the Insane opened in the 1850s, the approach to people with mental illness, they didn't even call it that, insanity is what they called it, was completely different than what we see now.

Thank goodness, but they were trying their best to bring comfort to these people, weren't they?

That's true and that's often something that is lost in a misunderstanding that these asylums were just prisons where unwanted people were thrown and locked up and imprisoned away.

And people did experience that and there were some cases of that in the evidence, but most of the evidence shows that family members really struggled with whatever behavior was going on with their family member.

So they petitioned the court to place that individual in the insane asylum and then they would drop them off.

And what it really was, it provided seeds for what we later know as mental illness, but it's a pre-Freudian world, I call it, and it's one where we're so used to now with mental health being a part of our overall health.

But back then, it was more of a deviance from a social norm.

It was behavioral in its very nature which made the type of care paternalistic.

The idea of the asylum was this caring, fatherly superintendent to listen to your problems and tried to help talk you through and counsel you through your problems.

So here you are, this hearty, Midwestern farmer who's got a farm and a family.

Well, let's say a revival comes through town and a fire-and-brimstone preacher preaching the word of God, and next thing you know, this farmer is studying the Bible intensely.

That was actually one of the large diagnoses in the early years, was studying the Bible too intensely.

- Oh, that was your disorder of some kind, huh?

- It was considered a disorder.

And so why is this farmer spending all day studying the Bible in his room?

So they would say, "Come to this institution.

These stresses in your life are making you not do what should be the appropriate behavior which is taking care of your family, working on the farm."

And so they would often have these family members come, stay at the institution.

It was really like a place of respite.

And which is also why we see a lot of things that had entertainment value, like the bowling alley, they would go on carriage rides, they had the band stands and the bands playing.

They also had newspapers from all over the state.

They would even bring in German language newspapers from Chicago to try to give people a sense of being a home away from home, give them some respite away from the stresses that were being created in their life.

- You ran across some very interesting therapies too.

Not only did they diagnose in a different way and they treated in a different way, but some of these therapies were kind of outlandish.

- So some of the shifting that occurred out of the moral treatment period which was more behaviorally based, they began to experiment a little more with chemicals, bromide, salines and types of things.

And then about the 1920s, they began to experiment with what's called hydrotherapy or water treatment.

Today, we think of going to a spa and getting some type of spa treatment.

- Yeah, sounds good.

- It sounds good.

(Mark laughing) The problem was, when a patient was having some type of more violent episode, they had this treatment where they would wrap the patient up like a mummy, tightly bound, and then they would pour buckets of ice-cold water over them and the body would have a reaction and almost overheat and they would have trained nurses standing by them to making sure that they didn't actually die from it but they would then, after about a half hour of screaming, and so clearly a traumatic experience, than they would unwrap them and cover them in warm blankets.

And it was considered a way to calm the patient.

Almost every time, and in retrospect stories, former employees were like, "Well, yes it was traumatic on the patient, but it worked and that's all we knew how to do."

And so again, one of those things where they were trying to figure out what to do, but at the same time, we can now look back and say there were some forms of arcane treatment.

- Well, Joe, it wouldn't be unusual to come across some characters when you're doing a story like this, right?

When you're writing a book and you're looking through newspaper articles and you're looking through all kinds of indications of what people were like and what were the patients like?

And you do come across some characters.

(Mark laughing) - Some real colorful characters and in fact, one of them, he went by General A.B.

Leaper.

He actually did fight in a unit from Illinois during the Civil War at Chickamauga.

He claims he fired the last shot at Chickamauga.

It was part of his claim to fame and the aura about him.

He was commonly seen wearing his full, Grand Army of the Republic with all his medals.

I don't think he was an actual general, but he did serve and is a veteran of the Civil War but he ended up at the insane asylum somewhere between what we could count 12 and 15 times.

He would come, then they would release him or he might run away and then he would come back.

He became someone who became an advocate for the mentally ill. And he tried to start a newspaper called the Lunatic Herald.

And it was covered in newspapers all across the nation that he was gonna be doing this.

So I read about this in the Washington Post and different types of media markets that they were saying, "Oh, General Leaper is gonna start the Lunatic Herald."

One of the colorful things he did was he wrote a letter to the czar of Russia and the queen of Britain asking them to...

It's almost like what courts do for people who can't make decisions for themselves.

He asked their countries to take over the United States.

He was very saddened by the internal strife that was going on at the turn of the century around 1900.

And he was very...

So obviously, a very compassionate man.

He was concerned about the strife.

He had a problem with the saloons.

He thought a lot of the problems came from the saloons so fed into some of the temperance movement stuff.

And eventually just sort of, I think, went back home to his town in Illinois and then eventually died with his family and he's buried, you know.

And so just a very colorful character.

Again, he would wear the uniform with all his medals very proudly.

- He would in and out of this institution many times, wasn't he?

- That's right.

That's correct.

- Okay.

And people, you know, it was...

I don't know what the stigma would have been at that time.

I imagine it would have been more stigmatizing having mental illness then, than it would be now.

And in fact, as we sit here, it's Mental Health Awareness Month, and May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

- Yeah, sorry, unfortunately, there were some stories especially by the 1940s and 50s where people were saying it was so sad because young people would show up at the Jacksonville State Hospital and they knew from that point on they were not getting out and they were just there for life.

And it was very sad to hear a lot of those stories.

And it's almost like, as I reviewed the history, it's almost that there's something that was going on through the 1930s and 40s that really shifted and changed things that it's almost as if this idea of a place for respite away from stresses of life.

It's almost like that the original idea of the moral treatment period, you know, was truly a good foundation for even the seeds of treatment, of what we know it today and really trying to help people through trauma.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, unfortunately, those who can't take care of themselves are always going to take the brunt of experimental treatments or whatever else goes on.

But I imagine you learned a lot and we can all learn a lot from the book.

Thank you, Joe, for spending some time with us.

"The Untold History of the First Illinois State Hospital for the Insane."

And if you didn't know about this Jacksonville institution, I think you'll find this very interesting.

With another Illinois story in Jacksonville, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

(light music) - [Announcer] "Illinois Stories" is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

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