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Subject: The Insane Asylum of the State of California at Stockton, founded in 1853
Date: 1 Jan 2005 21:49:06 -0700
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Doctors Row homes under renovation
Historic houses part of University Park development project
By Melanie Carroll
Record Staff Writer
Published Saturday, January 1, 2005
STOCKTON -- For more than a century, some doctors and staff who treated the mentally ill lived on the sprawling grounds in Stockton that held the former state mental hospital.
Today, the historic homes on Doctors Row are the most telltale reminders of California's first mental hospital.
The four homes -- three built in the Gothic Revival style and one in Tudor Revival -- are being renovated as part of the mixed-use University Park development on the 103-acre central Stockton campus of California State University, Stanislaus.
The homes are designated as California Historical Landmarks.
Dorothy Bramwell's father-in-law was a psychiatrist at the institution who lived in a Doctors Row home, and she recalled life there in the early 1940s.
"It was great," Bramwell said. "The house had seven fireplaces."
Raymond Holt lives at 504 E. Acacia St. in one of the Doctors Row homes. He is one of the workers painting and fixing the walls in the house. On a recent afternoon, he was mowing grass across the street, not far from the Magnolia Mansion, where superintendents of the mental hospital once lived.
"It's cool living in an old building," he said.
Recently, a fifth house was moved to the end of Doctors Row in an effort to preserve the home's historic value and to make way for a new school, said Dan Keyser, senior vice president of Grupe Commercial Co., which is developing the University Park project.
The Queen Anne-style cottage, originally from the area of nearby Grant Street, remains on wooden stilts.
After the state institution, which had several different names, closed its doors in 1996, the university took over the property. Planned at University Park are classrooms, offices, retail outlets, apartments and a community center.
The historic houses could be used for retail, educational or office space, Keyser said.
"We just don't know yet," he said. "Realistically, this is a 10- to 15-year project."
A Nov. 22, 1928, editorial in The Stockton Record described Doctors Row in detail:
"Yet the street is a miniature Chester Place or St. James Park (in London) with its brownstone gates leading into leafy vistas, bordered on one side by vine-clad brick houses, and on the other by the superintendent's home in its palm garden, a veritable Georgia or Louisiana plantation house transferred to a Western setting."
In the 1870s, Doctors Row was created when the original three brick homes were constructed on East Acacia Street. The hospital, known as The Insane Asylum of the State of California at Stockton, was founded in 1853 and served as the state mental institution.
In later, more politically correct times, the name was changed to the Stockton Developmental Center.
In the 1850s in San Francisco, a ship called the Euphemia was anchored at the head of Van Ness Avenue and housed dozens of people with mental illness. After the Stockton hospital opened, those locked up on the Euphemia were taken to Stockton, along with others from around the state and from Nevada.
Leslie Crow, chairwoman of Stockton's Cultural Heritage Board, said there was no social welfare system in the mid-19th century. Many people who came to California were traumatized by their trek out west and the stress of the Gold Rush, Crow said.
People who ran out of money, had a string of bad luck or suffered from mental illness could end up at the asylum, Crow said. Masturbation, religious fantasies or melancholy could be grounds for institutionalization.
In June 1880, the Stockton State Hospital had 1,116 patients, and later more arrived.
"There were well over 5,000 patients at the height of the institution" in the latter part of the 19th century, Crow said.
As the hospital's population grew, so did its importance in Stockton. When former President Ulysses S. Grant came to Stockton in 1879, the mental hospital was on the top of the list of places to visit.
"That tells you how important it was to Stockton," Crow said.
But Grant's wife fell ill and he was unable to visit the hospital, much to the chagrin of Stockton's elite, Crow said.
Bill Briggs, who worked at the institution from 1974 to 1982 as a psychiatric technician and social worker, said he used to tell people the place was haunted.
"There were a lot of people who lived there and died there," Briggs said.
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