Frances Farmer Room

At that first meeting in 2000, hospital staff, patients and citizens organized themselves into a group they called the Grave Concerns Association.  They discussed plans about how to restore the hospital cemetery and bring honor and dignity to the forgotten.  Patient advocates, genealogical societies, gardening groups, and cemetery restoration experts offered advice and counsel.  Work parties were organized. Memorials were held to honor the dead and reveal the names of those loved ones lost to history. 

Music room - dedicated to "play therapy"

In 2001, the Earth shook the hospital grounds.  Buildings were damaged and hundreds of patients were moved around to other wards.  During demolition, old artifacts had to be moved to an abandoned ward.  This afforded an opportunity to the GCA volunteers to organize those artifacts into an historical museum that would complement the work done by the Grave Concerns Association (GCA).

Kathleen Benoun with samples of "work therapy"

 Since 2004, the WSH historical museum has been toured by hundreds of visitors that include students, elected officials, the public, and hospital patients and staff.  On September 13, Kathleen Benoun — from the Washington State Library/Institutional Library Services–  hosted an open-house at the museum for visitors in honor of National Recovery Month and Heritage Happens Month — Pierce County.

WSH Museum

Ten years ago, I had a library visit from a hospital staffer who excitedly asked me to provide him information about the “dead people in the park.” Although I’ve received some odd questions during my years in the library of a state psychiatric hospital, this request was something unusual even for me. I suppressed a grin and asked him to give me more details. He told me he had stumbled upon a numbered stone during his lunch break walk in the park across the street from the hospital and was sure he had found the old patients cemetery of the hospital. I shrugged my shoulders and referred him to the campus historical expert. He left, and I thought that would be the end of talk about “dead people in the park.”

Not so. Two weeks later I received a call from my friend Laurel who invited me to attend a meeting after work about what to do about those “dead people in the park.” Now I was taken aback. Laurel is typically level-headed. She informed me that not only were there bodies in the park, there were over 3000 interred in a cemetery.Patients who lived and died at the “insane asylum” often had lost touch with their family members. The state bore the responsibility to bury their remains. Stigma about mental illness inspired lawmakers to stipulate that persons buried on site at a insane asylum must not name the deceased. Only a stone marker indicated the final resting place of somebody’s child, parent, relative.

More to follow….