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Archiver > SANATORIUMS > 2003-01 > 1043450604
From: AAevans <>
Subject: Re: [Sanatoriums] Gowanda Psychiatric Center Cemetery
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 18:23:41 -0500
In-Reply-To: <b8.375ec79e.2b631cce@aol.com>
Thank you very much.
Alice Evans
At 05:48 PM 1/24/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Here's an article that was in the Buffalo News.
>Kathy
>
>Fixing a final indignity
>By ELMER PLOETZ
>News Southtowns Bureau
>Buffalo News - Buffalo, Erie, New York
>22 June 2002
>
>Overgrown and neglected, the Gowanda Psychiatric Center Cemetery holds the
>bodies of about 1,000 former patients.
>But a restoration effort is under way.
>(Town of Collins)
>
>The first time Sandra Hooten walked through the tangled berry canes and
>burdock stalks at the old Gowanda Psychiatric Center cemetery, she wept.
>It's a cemetery without a sign. Only numbers - not names - are engraved on
>the stone and metal markers
>indicating the final resting places of about 1,000 patients from the
>facility.
>In fact, the state isn't even sure who most of the people are who are buried
>there.
>The records apparently were lost when the Psychiatric Center closed in 1994.
>The cemetery's condition is something Hooten and the other participants in
>Operation Dignity want to change.
>The group plans to clean and mark the Wheater Road Cemetery in Collins and
>restore a similar one nearby that has at least 500 other, mostly unmarked
>graves.
>The project has special significance for Hooten, her husband, Glenn, and many
>of the other people who staff Housing Options Made Easy,
>a group run by and for former mental health patients.
>In another place and time, they could have been the ones being buried by the
>numbers.
>Sandra Hooten recalls when she first went to the Wheater Road cemetery.
>It was as part of a program teaching peer advocacy, the part that focused on
>the social stigma of being a mental patient in past eras.
>The graveyard was more overgrown than it is now.
>"I just wept," she said. "I just couldn't believe life could be so . . .
>disregarded. It's not something you forget."
>Across the nation, peer groups like HOME have pushed for states to look at
>the places they buried their dead from mental hospitals and to try to restore
>dignity to their resting places.
>In Georgia, for example, a 30,000-plot cemetery at what once was the world's
>largest mental institution was restored.
>The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors has called
>for every state to restore its cemeteries.
>"There's not much we can do now for people who died years ago, but we can
>acknowledge that their lives mean something to us today, their struggles,
>and we're going to see that it doesn't happen again," said Kathy Lynch, a
>peer advocacy leader and recipient affairs specialist for the state Office of
>Mental Health's western region.
>More than 50,000 people are buried in cemeteries run by the Office of Mental
>Health, about half of them in upstate New York.
>According to Sandra Hooten, patients who died at Buffalo Psychiatric Center
>apparently were buried in cemeteries throughout the city and suburbs.
>But patients at Gowanda, which opened as a "homeopathic hospital" in 1898,
>were buried on state property if nobody claimed their bodies.
>At its peak, the hospital had 3,710 patients.
>The hospital's original Wheater Road cemetery, home to about 1,000 graves,
>isn't identified in any way.
>It's accessible only by a dirt road leading over a knoll and down to Clear
>Creek.
>Patient files misplaced
>
>"One of the really unfortunate things about the Gowanda cemetery is that most
>of the cemetery records are missing," said Darby Penney,
>director of historical projects for the Office of Mental Health. "Most of the
>other facilities, most of the records are still available.
>"Somehow, when Gowanda got closed, all their records were supposed to be sent
>to Buffalo, but the Buffalo Psychiatric Center says they never saw them.
>Somehow in the haste of closing, things had been misplaced."
>Penney, who is also assembling an oral history of the mental health system in
>conjunction with the New York State Archives,
>said it's a goal that hits close to home.
>"I am an ex-patient myself," she said. "A lot of us, when we walk in there,
>are like, "Had I been born 20 years earlier, I would have been one of those
>people in these graves.' "
>The Gowanda and Collins correctional facilities that took over the
>Psychiatric Center's grounds have found the records of patients who died
>after 1960, she said.
>The second cemetery, on Route 62, has a wooden sign marking it and is more
>cleanly mowed, but in some ways it's physically worse off.
>Lost to the center's past
>
>The approximately 500 stones are flat to the ground, and clumps of grass
>clippings and storm wear have combined to almost erase the numbers
>identifying them.
>Some of the later stones have thin metal plates identifying the patients, but
>they are rapidly tarnishing and wearing away - even some from as late as the
>1990s.
>The patients themselves were often forgotten as well. Many became lifelong
>residents of the hospital.
>Through much of the 1900s, placement in a mental hospital was seen almost as
>a funeral in itself to patients' relatives, according to Peter Zimmerman,
>a social worker for more than two decades at the hospital. Frequently, the
>patients were lost forever to mainstream society.
>"When I was hired in the 1970s, I was assigned to track down patients'
>families when they died," Zimmerman said
>. "The conversation would be like: "Who? Louie? Louie! Nah, he died 20 years
>ago.'
>"It was a protected environment for the people who were so misunderstood in
>their own communities and in their families.
>There was a sense of community there, but the cemetery reveals that in the
>final analysis you are "No. 231.' "
>Fixing past mistakes
>
>At its peak in the 1950s, more than 93,000 patients were in state mental
>institutions statewide.
>About one-third of them were patients who wouldn't even be considered mental
>patients today, including people suffering from
>Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and alcoholism, according to Roger Klingman, a
>spokesman for the Office of Mental Health.
>The Office of Mental Health has committed money from its capital budget to
>restore all of the cemeteries at its former psychiatric centers and has
>already started work in the Long Island area,
>but HOME's efforts are likely to allow local residents to shape what work is
>done.
>"They really were the forgotten," said Glenn Hooten. "They'd get dumped in
>the state hospitals."
>Sandra Hooten said she hopes that more volunteers will come forward.
>The goals are modest.
>"Do we want a memorial up there? A plaque?" she said.
>"We hope to start some kind of planting program down there, and of course
>ongoing maintenance."
>
>e-mail:
>
>
>==============================
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>go to:
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Alice <>
Researching Gaffney, O'Brien, Deluhery/Dulohery, Finn, Noonan, Lawless,
Evans, Helmer, Ackes, Binner, Ballou, Ottene
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