Imagine fighting for your country only to come home with terrible nightmares and debilitating PTSD. Then imagine your family taking you to an institution where you are cared for by strangers, abandoned by the people you love most. Imagine fighting for your country and then being buried on a hillside in the woods with a simple slab that identifies you just as “283.”
Imagine having postpardum depression and being sent away from your children by your husband who can’t handle your being sad. Imagine being unable to leave without your husband or a male family member signing you out. Imagine your husband abandoning you there so he can divorce you and marry someone else to care for your kids.
Imagine being old and sick, perhaps forgetful and sent to live in an asylum. Imagine being committed because you were a moody woman or one who reads too much and has too many opinions.
These are all perfectly acceptable reasons why real human beings were committed to places like the Athens Lunatic Asylum. I have written before about a similar asylum called the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. You can read here about the day I toured that place.
The old asylum on the hill in Athens is not open for tours. Intead, it’s owned by Ohio University and repurposed into an art museum, campus police, research space and class space. You can also explore the grounds and there are nature trails. There’s also room for events, an adventure course and sports fields.
My response to being there is always so complex. I look at these stately old buildings and can’t help but wonder about the atrocities that went on in this facility. They famously conducted partial labotomies here. Plus, the sheer horror of just being a smart woman whose freedoms were stripped away by a weak husband hits pretty close to home.
And don’t think it didn’t happen.
Designed by Dr. Thomas Kirkbridge who was a leader in the Moral Treatment Philosophy, the Athens Lunatic Asylum opened in 1874 in what was then countryside overlooking Athens. Kirkbridge believed that mental institutions should be located in pretty rural settings with plenty of acreage for exercise and labor thorough farming, gardening and occupations that might aid in a patient’s treatment while helping run the facilities.
I believe the terminology they used was “Healing Landscapes.”
Once upon a time, the grounds felt parklike with a waterfall, four poinds, and a variety of trees, plants and flowers that might be enjoyed along walking paths. It was so beautiful that many residents from town and country surrounding the asylum would come visit for walks and picnics.
Then there are the cemeteries. Three of them are the final resting places for over 1,900 patients who died here. Lucky patients had famillies who claimed their bodies but so many had no one to take them. The hillside cemeteries are probably the saddest I’ve ever seen because most individuals were buried with simple slabs and no name to identify them. They are identified by numbers only. This went on until the 1940s when they began using names. At some point, the state ceased caring for these cemeteries and they were left to vandals and to damage done by time and nature.
Forgotten.
People who in life were sent to a place to be forgotten remained forgotten in death as well.
About 25 years ago, the Athens Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness began reclamation of the cemeteries and found other organizations and people to rally around the cemeteries and the grounds. They have brought attention to a place once forgotten and peace and respect to people who perhaps received neither in life.
Adam and I explored here some on Saturday. We’ll go back another day when my leg is better and we have more time. As a person just out for walkabout, the history is fascinating. The place is extraordinary and it’s so peaceful up there above the city. But the cemetery is sobering and the thought of what went on here, all that the patients lost in being sent here, all that was forcibly taken from them, all the ways they suffered, well it’s almost too much to think about.
As mental health treatment evolved over time, so did the use of this space. By the time I was a child in the eighties, people joked about sending someone to the mental hospital at Athens. Later, as mental health treatment changed and transitioned from large facilities, we saw many individuals around the city who it seemed had been turned out and left to figure out life and health on their own. That may be an unfair assessment but that’s certainly how it appeared.
There are a number of these Kirkrbride institutions left around the country and many have historic register status. I highly recommend visiting the one in West Virginia because they tell the stories of patients and of staff that worked there. Click here for details.
Dayton’s Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum was founded in 1841, winning them a reputation for being one of the oldest and best rural garden cemeteries in the country. At over 200 acres, it’s too much to see in the afternoon we had to explore last week. With over 3,000 trees, it’s one of the more impressive cemeteries I have seen in person.
The fall foliage was mostly golden and was completely breathtaking.
You enter through a Romanesque gateway that was completed in 1889 alongside a chapel and office. We didn’t stop at the chapel but I wish now that we did to see the original Tiffany stained glass windows. Another trip.
There are some interesting people buried here including Julia Reichert who I wrote about last week. The Wright Brothers are buried here along with their younger sister Katherine who was a suffragette and an important part of her brothers’ business. She deserves a story of her own.
Poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, humorist Erma Bombeck, inventor of the folding stepladder John H. Baisley, inventor of the Yellow Pages Loren M. Berry and freed slave and writer Jordan Anderson are among the notable people who lie at rest here. For every one of the well known individuals buried here there are thousands of normal people, souls who lived quiet lives for whom the bell tolled but there’s no one left to remember them. I suppose that’s why some of the wealthy have enormous monuments and obelisks to grab your attention as you drive or walk through. They’re hoping to outsmart short memories and the unforgiving march of time.
We parked near the Wright family plot and explored from there. It’s interesting that the fathers of flight, the people responsible for one of the most important inventions in world history, are buried with a rather humble marker.
It wasn’t lost on me that they are buried in the flight path of Wright Patterson Air Force Base as we watched from this hillside as military planes took off and landed. It made me wonder if Wilbur and Orville Wright ever imagined how prolific flight would be, how enormous the planes could grow, or how they could be used as weapons of war and tools for peace.
It was quite an experience to stand here and contemplate these questions.
If you like cemeteries as much as I do, Woodland is worthy of your time. I hope to return another day and perhaps in another season when we might see snow or spring blooms.
Want to see more? Check out Make The Journey Fun on Facebook. I’ll share some more pictures!
Birdsong.
A slight breeze in the pines.
Two squirrels scurrying up a tree.
These are the things I noticed first. Then I realized I could actually hear some street noises but the sounds of nature were so distracting, the city traffic took a back seat.
I was at Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, one of the nation’s most extraordinary final resting places in the nation.
It was mid October but the trees were still mostly green around Cincinnati. It was a cool morning that felt like fall and the occasional small pop of color helped to make it feel more authentically fall even if the color wasn’t that much.
We walked part of the cemetery’s historic section twice last week, admiring the scenery and scrambling from one extraordinary headstone to even more magnificent ones. We read names and dates and tried to decipher the meanings of the iconography. I was reminded of a book on cemetery iconography that I should have bought.
There’s so much to see here. Some of the mausoleums are getting much needed TLC including the Dexter. This one is the crown jewel of Spring Grove and was probably the Bentley of mausoleums when it was built.
Scaffolding and caution tape distract from nature’s gifts but warmed my cynical heart because construction means that someone is caring for this historic structure.
Sea captains, infants, politicians and women who are known mostly as the wife of some man, all receive equal treatment here. Death knows no bounds and no mercy to young or old. All are gone from this earth but each have something to remind everyone else that they once lived.
And in the end, isn’t that what we all want? We just want to make sure that we will be remembered for having lived and that those we care about won’t be forgotten either.
Spring Grove. If you’ve never been there, you won’t understand the magnitude and the significance of this incredible place. If you have been, you understand why I like to return and why I wish to see it in every season.
The blogging community is an interesting place. We make friends with people we have never met in real life, sharing stories that sometimes make us feel like we’re old friends. Many of them are people we would never cross paths with in real life.
That’s certainly the case with Jinjer. Honestly, I don’t recall how or when we met but I have followed along as she has spent recent years working remotely from Arkansas where she cared for her elderly mother.
I never knew her mom’s name but was terribly sad when she died earlier this year. Jinjer shared with her blogging pals that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mom’s grave in Indiana before heading back to the life that was waiting for her in California. Her plate was full closing up this chapter, packing, donating and selling things. She needed to orchestrate the cross country move with an elderly cat and there was no way to justify going that far out of her way.
So when she mentioned that her mom was buried in Marion, Indiana, I knew I could help. That’s because I had been thinking about a trip to that area and this provided a wonderful purpose for going. While I couldn’t help Jinjer get there, I could at least go and take pictures of the grave. It’s a small gesture but I thought it might help.
She’s buried at Marion National Cemetery and I went there late Saturday afternoon, not realizing how enormous it would be. Turns out, I went to the wrong section – I needed section CS and was in section C. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped and rain set in so I surrendered and went into town for Mexican.
Luckily, Jinjer had emailed me a map that day so I figured out my error and returned at sunrise on Sunday morning. It was a piece of cake to find my way around with the map but I would have spent the entire day looking if necessary. It was important to me because I know how hard it is to lose someone important and what it means to visit their grave.
So I knelt on the ground, introduced myself to Jinjer’s parents and told them why I had come. Sadly, you can’t leave flowers this time of year so I just placed the flowers for a few minutes and snapped some pictures for Jinjer.
Jinjer laughed when I said that I apologized to her mom for being unable to leave the flowers. Haha! “After all, I don’t make the rules,” I said.
It’s a tiny gesture but hopefully one that helped my friend. I’m so grateful that I found her mom and the weather cooperated so she could have pretty pictures.
Jinjer’s parents have a beautiful resting place. It’s awe inspiring to be surrounded by these elegant marble headstones as far as the eye can see and to think of all the people they represent.
We all deserve to be remembered after we are gone and the living we leave behind deserve to find peace.
Here are some immortal words from one of the world’s great thinkers, Winnie the Pooh……
If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.