Discovered documents reveal more about Milwaukee County Insane Asylum
MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Long after it was torn down, many pieces of the past connected to the Milwaukee County Insane Asylum still exist today, and a recent discovery is helping researchers and historians alike learn more about the place thousands called home over 100 years.
"As I went through, I found relics of old infrastructure, gardens, and other things inside the woods. I didn't know what they were, and when I talked to other people, I got inconsistent stories about what they were, so I felt compelled to find that answer," Amateur historical and Volunteer President of Friends of County Ground Parks Jonathan Piel said.
In 2017, Piel was walking his dog through what is now County Grounds Park when some mysterious structures piqued his interest, and after digging, he found a history dating back over a century.
"I was able to piece together all these things that I found in the woods, based on old maps, written text, old photographs, things like that, and it helped really bring together a story about the mental health hospital that had been established here in 1880," he said.
The Milwaukee County Isane Asylum stood for 100 years here in Wauwatosa. During its run, strides were made to improve the healthcare people received. Now, recently discovered documents show how the day-to-day was for those who wandered these woods.
"This one is from 1880," Milwaukee County Historical Society Lead Archivist Steve Shaeffer said about newly found images and ledgers about the asylum. "It has a picture of the first inmate, and then it gives detailed information."
Shaeffer tells CBS 58 that these files collected dust for decades in a hospital basement.
"We were told that anything pre-1940 had been destroyed," he explained.
Until privacy concerns became prominent in the mid-1920s, doctors' notes detail who was committed and for what.
"They are originally 275 patient beds," Dana Landress, Assistant Professor of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said about the original 19th-century asylum.
Landress is an expert on asylums and psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th century who has reviewed some of the documents.
"You can see a very wide variety of reasons and causes for admission. So, this could be anything from a sort of general category of feeble-mindedness or lunacy to some instances of pauperism or petty theft. Dementia and senility were a huge category of admission of this period," she said. "Women can be admitted for pregnancy out of wedlock, for sexual deviancy for all sorts of things that today, of course, we would not consider to be a sort of diagnostic disease category."
Not long after the first asylum was built, a hospital was constructed to treat patients medically.
"This hospital was also revolutionary because it provided outdoor recreation for the patients in ways that weren't previously available," Piel explained. "This was a big difference from what existed before 1880, which was essentially incarceration for patients."
A protective law in the late 19th century ensured every person admitted to a state asylum underwent a medical examination by two state physicians.
"I'm not saying it was perfect, and it's limited by what they knew at the time, but, for the time, the people that were interviewing the potential patients were the best in their field and knew what mental illness was or their conception of it," Shaeffer said.
Since resources were limited, patients were instrumental in keeping the massive grounds up and running.
"So, you have men who are performing institutional upkeep, who are doing work in the field, who might be constructing buildings or performing maintenance, and then you have women working in the laundry, working in the sewing rooms, working in the kitchens," Landress said.
Long after their discharge, remnants of patients' creations still exist.
"This [staircase] is over 100 years old. It was built between 1907 and 1916. Again, this was work done by patients and an opportunity in industrial therapy for patients to learn a skill, mortar work, or things like that, that if once they were released, they may be able to use in finding future employment and contributing to their economic stability."
In the later decades of the hospital, patients even went on field trips.
"The activities that they took people on, especially in the 50s and 60s, is unbelievable.," Shaeffer said. "There were parties there, birthday parties, Halloween parties, all of that, and we have those shots."
The progress of the later years of the hospital does not reflect its entire existence; many treatments were experimented with to help the afflicted.
"They had continuous baths, especially for some patients who would sit in the bath and just have water running the whole time, and that was considered soothing, and for patients who were agitated, give them the opportunity to have a continuous bath," Piel said.
In the early 20th century, treatments were approached scientifically.
"Insulin shock therapy is something that was actually introduced in November of 1936," Landress explained. "The idea was really to provide enough insulin to place the patients in regular low blood sugar comas, and these could last anywhere from an hour to four hours."
Forced sterilization was also prominent, as there was a nationwide focus on eugenics. The patients rarely consented to the procedure. Instead, they were often told they were getting appendectomies.
"So many of the asylums' superintendents introduced this legislation in order to curb what they see as the reproduction of the next generation, and that would often be a condition of women who are paroled back out into society," Landress said.
While its history is complicated, the land where so many patients called homes is now one of Milwaukee County's newest parks, with volunteers like Piel working to preserve it.
"I give history tours, and we have other people who give cemetery tours, or hydrology tours, or mammal tours.," he said. "So, we're finding ways to bring hundreds of people into this space, a space that maybe again they didn't know about, or they weren't comfortable coming into before."
Nicknamed Sanctuary Woods, the hope is this land will live on for many more generations. To learn about the efforts to restore the park and see 25 points of interest connected to the Milwaukee County Insane Asylum, visit countygroundsfriends.org.