by Joanne
Passet
My great grandmother spent forty-six
years in the Toledo State Hospital. In the only picture I have of her,
Elizabeth Ross Frank stands in a grove of pine trees on the hospital grounds.
Taken in the 1930s, it shows her wearing a slightly rumpled long-sleeved dress
sewn from dotted fabric, a few wisps of silver hair escaping a pragmatic bun at
the nape of her neck. Despite being institutionalized for over four decades,
she stands erect and dignified, hands relaxed at her sides and dark eyes gazing
into the camera’s lens. She does not look insane.
I first learned about my great
grandmother the year I turned thirteen. One warm Saturday in the late 1960s,
the pastor drove a station wagon full of teens across northwest Ohio to tour
the state hospital. Eager to spread good cheer, we crafted fluffy flowers from
colored tissue paper and fastened them to green pipe cleaner stems. Clutching
bouquets in our hands, we entered the ward, but came to an abrupt stop when we
encountered a long hallway lined with wheelchair-bound patients. Heads lolled
on chests, muttering filled the air, and the smell of urine stung our noses. An
elderly woman reached out to me, but I recoiled at the sight of cloth ties
binding her body to the chair. Forcing an awkward smile, I thrust my flowers
into her gnarled hands and retreated outside.
All the way home I kept
thinking about the horrors I had seen. How could anyone live like that? After
dinner as I dried dishes, I poured out my concerns to my mother. I couldn’t
imagine anyone regaining their mental health in such an environment. The
kitchen grew silent, except for the sound of dishes being rinsed, then I heard
Mom inhale. “Your Dad’s grandmother was a patient there.”
“What?” I had researched our
family tree for a school project, and had never heard such a story. “Why was she
there?”
Mom glanced at Dad, engrossed
in the sports page of the daily newspaper. “Childbirth injuries.” Mom shook her
head. “Such a shame.”
I knew better than to ask Mom
to elaborate. As much as she loved to gossip, she was a bit of a prude when it
came to discussing “female complaints.” Only years later did I realize she
attributed my great grandmother’s hospitalization to postpartum
depression.
“I
have one of her quilts. Would you like to see it?”
Nodding, I followed Mom into
the bedroom and watched as she positioned a metal step stool in front of her
closet. Steadying herself, she reached to the top shelf and tugged at the
corner of a rectangular box. Dust floated through the air as she removed it
from the shelf. Reaching up, I let the box slide into my arms and carried it to
the bed. An aroma of mothballs filled the air when I opened it and parted
acidic tissue paper.
I was disappointed when we
spread the quilt on top of the bed. Quilters today sew with colorful
wrinkle-free fabric, but my great grandmother had made do with scraps of old
dresses and shirts—blue and brown plaid, lavender and white checks, black and
white gingham, a yellow floral print, and a field of red dotted with tiny
flowers. Bits of yarn bound the pieced top to a striped flannel backing. I had
expected to see intricate applique or a familiar pieced pattern like
Grandmother’s Flower Garden or the Double Wedding Ring. Yet when I took a
closer look at the quilt, I discovered amazing precision. My great grandmother
had sewn forty-two pieced squares in orderly rows, six across and seven down. I
admired her even stitches, twelve to the inch, and the precise way the corner
of each piece met the next, yet I was puzzled. How could this quilt be the
product of an unsettled mind?
Eager to learn more, I dug
through a box of family portraits in search of her picture but came up empty
handed. Instead, I found a solitary image of my great-grandfather at midlife
and a portrait of Elizabeth’s children taken shortly before she left home. In
it, her firstborn, Will, wears high-buttoned boots with short pants and a
neatly pressed dark suit jacket, a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket.
He is seated, a self-satisfied look on his face, while his pudgy sister Alma
stands to one side in a pleated winter dress, relieved only by a bit of white
lace at her neck. Unbeknownst to the photographer, his image unwittingly
captured the waning days of Alma’s childhood. Only nine when her mother was
hospitalized, she had not yet mastered the secrets of whitening sheets, sewing
a fine seam, or baking an apple pie.
Sadness washed over me as I
pictured my preadolescent grandmother, denied a mother’s love and forced to
exchange her childhood and schooling for a lifetime of cooking, canning,
baking, mopping, scrubbing, ironing, washing, darning, mending, and gardening.
Dead by the age of seventy-two, people at the funeral said she had worked
herself to death.
One day a few years later, a
padded envelope arrived in the mail. “I thought you’d like to have this picture
of your great grandmother,” an elderly cousin had scrawled on a yellow Post-it
note. Pulling out a manila folder, I opened it and found myself staring into my
great grandmother’s eyes. If only the picture could speak. I waited until after
dinner to show it to my father, and was stunned when he pronounced it a good
likeness.
“How could you possibly know?”
“Once Mom and Dad took us boys
on the train to visit her.”
This
was news to me. “What do you remember about that visit? About her?”
“She
was much like any other old person. She commented on how much we had grown,
then sat next to Mom talking in low tones.” Whatever they discussed, nothing
seemed out of the ordinary to my father, not even the hospital grounds, where
he and his brothers played until it was time to return home.
Haunted by my great
grandmother’s story, I set out to discover more about her life and the real
reason for her commitment. Elizabeth Frank’s tombstone provided a death date
and led me to the local newspaper archives for a copy of her obituary. Born in
the spring of 1856, she grew up in a northwest Ohio county named for the
Wyandot Indians who, like her, experienced forced removal and life in
confinement. Her German-born father focused on material success, mining gold in
California until he earned enough money to buy farmland in Ohio. Unfortunately,
success did not guarantee happiness. A bolt of lightning killed his namesake in
1871, and his weary wife died four years later. As the oldest girl among five
surviving children, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth assumed responsibility for the
household and her younger siblings.
No portrait survives to
commemorate the day in August 1879 when my great grandmother married George
Frank, the son of a neighboring German Lutheran farmer. Sporting a Van Dyke
beard, her husband was a hardworking first-generation American, determined to
establish himself by putting in long hours. Five decades later he was still
clearing trees from his land with an axe when a stroke took his
life.
Like other farm wives of her
generation, Elizabeth filled daylight hours with work, sewing clothing, baking
bread, cooking meals, and canning fruits and vegetables on a wood stove in the
summer kitchen. In 1881 she gave birth to a son, followed by a daughter three
years later. While her husband cleared 160 acres of oak and maple trees,
Elizabeth planted nearly two dozen eastern white pines along the bend in the
road at the front of their property. Each day she carried two-gallon buckets of
hand-pumped water to the saplings, coaxing them to grow. Today a half dozen
remain as her legacy to us, having survived years of drunk drivers and high
winds.
Tragedy
struck the family in 1885 when the failure of the Central Bank and the loss of
an eight-hundred dollar investment led Elizabeth’s father to suffer a
“dethronement of reason.” Eluding his family, he entered his workshop, climbed
up on a barrel, tied a rope to a rafter, slipped a noose around his neck, and
jumped. I initially dismissed his suicide as situational, but after reading
studies about suicide, I began to question if the family had a history of
mental illness.
No
documents survive to shed light on my great grandmother’s life from her
father’s death until the day in March, 1894, when my great grandfather
petitioned the county probate court to declare his wife insane. Under Ohio law
at the time, a husband could commit his spouse to a state hospital upon the
recommendation of a judge, a physician, and two witnesses. More than 120 years
have passed since that day, yet her commitment papers remain sealed under the
HIPPA Privacy Rule, making it impossible for me to discover why she lost her
freedom.
Approaching
the question from another angle, I contacted the Ohio Historical Society, which
houses the Toledo State Hospital’s records. Upon learning that her oldest
living descendant, my father, could petition for access to some information, I
assisted him with the paperwork. Six weeks later he received an official letter
in the mail, a single sheet of paper containing three short paragraphs.
Scanning the page, I devoured
the few snippets of information: the date of her committal, the person
accompanying her to the asylum, and her diagnosis: chronic mania. Immediately I
pictured a fastidious German-American housewife scrubbing floors and windows
over and over again. Then I noticed two more words: homicidal behavior. I
couldn’t believe it. Not in my family! When I told my father the shocking news,
he nodded, then shared another piece of our family’s unspoken history: my great
grandmother believed her husband wanted to harm her, and attacked him with a
butcher knife. Saddened by this discovery, I filed the letter away in a folder
bearing her name, convinced I would learn no more.
Years
passed. My father entered a nursing home, and our farmhouse grew too much for
my mother to manage. While sorting through dishes, correspondence, pictures,
clothing, furniture, and papers accumulated during sixty years of marriage, we
once again removed the quilt from its shelf in the closet. “Would you like to
have it?” she asked, eager to see a family heirloom passed on to the next
generation.
A chill filled the air the
October evening I took my Elizabeth’s quilt home and spread it on my Civil
War-era bed with its carved walnut headboard. It looked brighter than I
remembered. Exhausted from days spent emptying Mom’s farmhouse, I crawled
between the sheets and pulled the quilt up to my chest, fingering its coarse
Depression-era cotton and the lumpy batting inside. Tears came to my eyes as I
thought about my great grandmother’s life. I would never know what she thought
or felt, but I vowed to renew my effort to piece together as much of her story
as I possibly could from scraps of information preserved by the hospital and
others incarcerated there.
Turning to annual reports, I
reconstructed the day my great grandmother arrived at the Toledo State
Hospital. She and my great grandfather traveled by train because the trip would
have taken two days by buggy. The county sheriff or a trusted friend may have
accompanied them on the journey. It was not unusual for the patient to wear a
straitjacket.
Upon
her arrival, an attendant would have taken Elizabeth to an Admission Room and
examined her for scars, bruises, and vermin. She stood five feet seven inches
and weighed 135 pounds, a sturdy farm wife who kept herself neat and tidy.
Donning hospital clothing until her own could be marked, she was then escorted
to the ward, where she learned about hospital routines and met her housemates,
other women suffering from mania, melancholia, menopause, menstrual disorders,
overwork, pregnancy, and religious excitement.
A frugal man, my great
grandfather must have taken some comfort in knowing the state covered the cost
of his wife’s care (until 1910, when the hospital began charging four dollars
per week). But what was he thinking as he sat in the administrative building
speaking with the hospital’s superintendent? Was he numb? Or was it a relief to
turn his wife’s care over to others so he and his children could sleep in
peace? Life with her must have been worse than living with the stigma of having
a wife in the asylum, but nonetheless he was losing his companion, the mother
of his children.
I like to think a farmwife like
Elizabeth would have found solace in the hospital landscape—150 lush acres
punctuated by trees, shrubs, well-manicured lawns, and lakes. Opened in 1888,
the Toledo State Hospital initially operated on the premise that environment
was the best medicine for a troubled mind. Instead of being locked in a sterile
hospital ward, restrained with straps and mittens, Elizabeth and other
“moderately disturbed” patients lived in solid two-story brick cottage with
spacious day rooms and inviting porches with inviting chairs lining the front
porch. Three times a day, attendants escorted patients along tidy sidewalks to
the women’s dining room, where other attendants served as wait staff.
Examining pictures of the
hospital found online, I try to envision how the grounds must have appeared to
work-weary farmwives with demanding husbands. Could a woman raised with my
great grandmother’s rigid German-Lutheran background ever learn to relax? I can
see her attending church services in the chapel, but it’s hard to imagine her
joining other residents at dances, concerts, theatrical performances, baseball
games, lantern shows, and lectures. Did she ever accompany other patients on
outings to the circus or the nearby Walbridge amusement park, with its colorful
merry-go-round and wooden roller coaster? Was she in the audience when the
newly emerging African American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar recited his recently
published work?
In addition to providing a
healing environment, hospital employees administered noninvasive
hydrotherapeutic treatments, including soothing baths, needle sprays, salt
glows, and wet sheet packs. Only later, after state hospitals grew overcrowded,
did they experiment with electric shock therapy and lobotomies.
In the late-nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the state hospital superintendent believed work
assignments would give able-bodied patients a sense of purpose and
accomplishment. In keeping with this premise, Elizabeth became a bed-maker,
stripping soiled linen, turning mattresses, applying clean sheets and blankets,
and fluffing pillows. I don’t know if she had other gender-specific
assignments, for instance, cleaning wards, washing and ironing clothes, and
working in the kitchen. I know she sewed, because I have her quilt, but in all
those years there she may also have tried her hand at making woven baskets, rag
rugs, and paper flowers—anything to pass the time in a constructive manner.
A number of patients recovered
their health and returned home. According to the document from the Ohio
Historical Society, a hospital physician pronounced my great grandmother ready
for a trial home visit in March 1896 and promised to discharge her into her
husband’s custody if all went well. In the two years since Elizabeth’s
admission, her son had grown into a young man of fifteen and her daughter, now
eleven, had become the mistress of the house. Imagine the tension and
uncertainty.
Likely uneasy in his wife’s
presence, my great grandfather arranged for a neighbor to sleep in the house at
night. In an environment filled with constant scrutiny and emotional distance,
Elizabeth’s paranoia resurfaced. In less than six weeks, she accused her
husband of trying to poison her, and he returned her to the hospital. The
admitting physician recorded her inability “to remain adjusted to home
conditions,” noting she had threatened “injury to her family and herself.” It
was her last visit home.
When I told my father about
Elizabeth’s home visit, I sparked another memory, this time of a day in the
early 1930s when the state hospital informed his parents of her eligibility for
discharge. The hospital had grown overcrowded and administrators deemed a
number of patients eligible for release. By this time, Elizabeth’s daughter
Alma was caring for a household of men—her father, husband, and four strapping
sons. She worried about how her mother and father would interact. Alma’s
husband, my grandfather, feared his mother-in-law would be too much of a burden
for his already overworked wife. And my great grandfather, a small man, still
feared his wife might cause him harm.
Meeting to discuss their
options, the family could not figure out how to reintegrate Elizabeth into the
household, so they decided to leave her in the hospital. The decision came at a
cost. It was the Great Depression and the fees for her care had reached $600
per annum, far more than many farm families earned in a year. In her seventies
and illiterate, she had nowhere to go.
Their decision appalled me, but
I was not surprised. My childhood was peppered with stories about neighborhood men
who failed to get ahead because they had wives who insisted on doing frivolous
things like buying store-bought clothing and going on vacation. Good daughters,
I learned, took jobs in town, lived at home, and turned their earnings over to
their fathers. I knew the barn was more important than the house, crops than
flowers, sons than daughters, and land ownership the most important of all.
There was no place for Elizabeth in this worldview.
A simple five by seven card
records great grandmother’s death from bronchial pneumonia on December 23,
1940. During her time in the hospital, her diagnosis, originally chronic mania,
changed to dementia praecox with paranoid tendencies, a diagnostic box
appearing in American asylum records beginning in 1896. According to historian
Richard Noll (American Madness), state hospitals at one time
assigned this label to approximately twenty-five to fifty percent of patients.
As I read more about this premature form of dementia, later relabeled
schizophrenia, I started questioning my great grandmother’s diagnosis. Given
the progressive disintegration of dementia praecox patients in a
pre-pharmaceutical era, I doubted her condition would have improved enough to
justify a proposed discharge after forty years of hospitalization.
When I first learned about
Elizabeth’s lengthy hospitalization, I assumed it must be an aberration. I
wouldn’t allow myself to believe others suffered a similar fate. Then I read an
article about the Toledo State Hospital cemeteries, where at least 1,994 men,
women, and children who died during their hospitalization lie interred under
brick-like stones inscribed with patient numbers. Like Elizabeth, many of them
had spent decades in the hospital, but upon their death, no one claimed their
bodies. Some had outlived their families, while others had been abandoned, in
life and in death.
With the passage of time, state
hospital cemeteries in Toledo and throughout the nation fell into disrepair,
their neglect perpetuating the stigma of mental illness. In many locations,
only rows and rows of depressions in the ground remained to mark patients’
graves, the numbered stones obscured by layers of dirt and grass. In recent
years, however, volunteers working under the auspices of state hospital
cemetery reclamation projects are restoring grave markers and identities to
these faceless patients, and they are transforming hospital cemeteries into
places of remembrance and reflection.
As I scrolled through the names of hundreds of
women buried there, I wondered if I had found my great-grandmother’s friends,
women who she knew better than members of her family: Gertrude G., Phoebe H.,
Grace L., Jennie P., Lettie S., and many more. Year after year, decade after
decade, they had celebrated Easter, July 4th, Thanksgiving, and
Christmas holidays together. They had walked to and from breakfast, lunch, and
dinner talking about the weather, flowers in bloom, and squirrels running
across the lawn. They had worked with one another in the hospital kitchens,
laundries, and sewing rooms. The optimist in me wants to believe they grew to
care for one another.
Unlike the patients buried in
the hospital cemeteries, my great-grandmother’s body returned home for
interment in late December, 1940. During her lifetime, our nation matured as it
endured the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Women earned
the right to vote, experienced the autonomy that comes with driving a car, and
had their voices heard in public as well as in private, but she missed out on these
rites of passage. A daughter, a sister, an aunt, a wife, a mother, my
great-grandmother was denied the day-to-day reality of these roles. Yet the day
after Christmas a handful of mourners, all of them family, gathered in her
former home for a subdued funeral service. For his text, the pastor chose Luke
8: 4-8, the parable of the sower. He may have compared Elizabeth to the seed
scattered on a busy path where it has no chance to grow, or to seed spread
among rocks and thorn bushes, but I prefer to think of her growing where she
was planted, on the grounds of the Toledo State Hospital, as friend to other
patients, helper to attendants, seamstress who mended clothes, and creator of
the quilt that comforts me on cold winter nights.
Joanne Passet lives, writes, and knits in
Bloomington, Indiana. Her latest book, Indomitable:
The Life of Barbara Grier, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Readers
can follow her blog at https://knitwritebton.wordpress.com/.
