- [Narrator] Every book has a story inside and every grave marker has a story beneath.

Numbers are used to locate books on a shelf at the library.

Numbers are also used to mark the graves in an old cemetery in Athens, Ohio.

The old Athens Lunatic Asylum's grave book found in Ohio University's Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections at Alden Library connects names to the numbers, and with a grave book as their guide, researchers have learned the life stories of some buried here, people who didn't have a name or a voice until now.

- At this point, it looks like there's just over 1900 people who are buried there.

They sometime in their life came up against a mental distress or trauma or allegedly so, and in these cases then died and then placed under a number.

That's just, to me it's very disrespectful.

These people were people.

They deserve the dignity and respect that all people do.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] They sit up on top of a hill in Athens, Ohio, in an area locals now call The Ridges, several Victorian style buildings, many of which are now empty, but don't lack a story to tell.

These buildings were once home to the Athens Lunatic Asylum, a tale that begins in 1867.

- There was a move to establish in the legislature a new state asylum in southeastern Ohio and a physician from Athens who was a legislator took up the cause, so 30 different locations, towns in southeastern Ohio applied to this small committee of politicians essentially, and also a physician from southeastern Ohio to be the place where this asylum would be, and Athens was chosen.

At the time it would be, it was a huge economic development bonus to have such a thing in your town.

And it was also an honor to be participating in this, you know, this noble 19th century venture to help people with mental illness.

- [Narrator] The Athens asylum was one of 49 built in the United States in the 19th century under what was called the Kirkbride Plan.

- This was during the moral treatment era and it was a great, it was began in actually in Europe and England, Germany saw, there was actually the Quaker William Tuke set up an asylum under what he called moral treatment, in which people would be a small-scale asylum, a few hundred people at most.

And there would be regular routines.

People would be treated with kindness.

There would be beautiful views for them to see out the window.

There would be uplifting activities.

There would be concerts, chapel services.

And it was called moral treatment, meaning not that there were morals involved, but that meaning humane in that sense.

And that was operationalized in America by Thomas Kirkbride, who was the head of a hospital and the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane as it was called in the 19th century.

- [Narrator] It was a plan started with the best of intentions for the patients and for the community.

- There was a huge parade for the groundbreaking in 1868 to march up the hill.

Thousands, literally thousands of people came and celebrated this new undertaking that was going to come to Athens.

- [Narrator] The asylum opened on January 1st, 1874.

Male patients lived in the south wing.

Women in the north.

There were 544 rooms.

It was built to house 252 patients in single bedrooms, and another 290 in dormitory-style rooms.

- Kirkbride also felt that it would be important to have a kind of buffer zone, if you want to call it that.

And in the case of the Athens asylum, that's where the lakes or the ponds come in below the main complex, and these are to be available to, under chaperone circumstances, available to patients, but also available to staff.

And then the local community.

They thought, well, we'll have a fountain out front, and it'll be a pit fountain, and it's a pool type of thing, and then coming out of the middle of the pool will be this fountain that rises up out of it.

- [Narrator] And eventually part of the fountain included an alligator.

- And I'm not really sure who got the idea of putting an alligator in there, but that became a kind of an entertainment type of thing.

You know, something odd and a little different.

And they continued with it.

- [Narrator] People were admitted to the asylum for all kinds of reasons.

Some that we wouldn't consider acceptable today.

- One of the great arguments about asylums in the 19th century was did they come about to bring about social control or was it a humanitarian?

Well, the answer is kind of both.

And you could see pretty startling examples of social control.

There was in one account I read of a coal miner from Nelsonville.

He had moved there a year ago from West Virginia, and he was hospitalized because he was trying to start a labor union.

He was healthy.

His body was healthy.

His mind was clear, but he has had overstudy on the labor question and he thinks it is his special duty to establish the knights of labor.

Well, you know, that was an enormous threat to the landowning, coal mine-owning people and politicians.

So he was hospitalized in the asylum.

So that would be, you know, a social control example.

- [Narrator] It wasn't long into the asylum outgrew itself and the idea of moral treatment.

- Psychiatry itself changed and asylums were very much critiqued for being, you know, too big and nothing was going on, becoming a backwater of psychiatry and medicine.

The new research was being done by neurologists in laboratories.

Asylums were no longer the cutting edge.

- [Narrator] No matter what treatment approach was being used at the time, patients who died at the Athens asylum with no family to claim them had to be laid to rest.

And an approach was developed to deal with that, too.

Numbered tombstones with no names.

But no one is really sure why this approach was taken.

- Well, we can only guess.

In talking with other asylum scholars, it's kind of, you know, it's a state agency, so let's order a hundred tombstones or we'll order 50 for men and 50 for women.

And we'll have the numbers engraved on 'em and we'll keep 'em for delivery and then we will just use them.

So the expense was not undertaken in the early years to put names on there.

I'm thinking it's probably a matter of efficiency and expense.

- [Narrator] Men and women were buried on separate sides of the cemeteries.

The first female was buried on the asylum grounds in 1880.

Grave number one on the female side of the cemetery belongs to Mary Steele.

The former teacher from Ireland was admitted to the Athens Lunatic Asylum as patient number 150 from Adams County, nearly two months after it opened in February 1874.

She was buried on January 24th, 1880.

- These people at the asylum grounds who are buried in these cemeteries were unclaimed.

So we have a number of reasons why these people ended up as they did in the asylum cemeteries.

The other reasons can be that there were actually no family members to be contacted in the first place, or it can be the case that the administrators at the asylum could not find surviving family members or the administrators may not have tried very hard.

- [Narrator] The story of the first male buried at the asylum is not as easy to tell.

The grave is nowhere to be found.

- It's a very strange circumstance.

The grave registration book starts with the number one for females.

It starts with the number 62 or 63 for males.

Now, who knows why?

I mean, these might very well be the very first males.

And maybe there was the idea that, well, we'll start with the number one for women and let it run for awhile and we'll jump, start with a number in the sixties for the males.

- [Narrator] Over the life of the asylum, three separate cemeteries were used for burials.

The grave registration book is the only record of who's buried under what number.

And it's the key to putting names to these tombstones.

For many years, the book was considered a confidential document and could not be accessed as a matter of state law.

- There are certain categories of records that are automatically confidential, and anything else is a public record.

One of the categories of confidential records is medical records.

- [Narrator] So the key to unlocking the secrets hidden in this book turned out to be a local lawmaker.

- The real problem they ran into was that the records were not easily obtainable for folks, and so ultimately the bill that we passed turned them into historical documents, and then those historical documents, of course, were available to the public.

So it made it a lot easier for the descendants and interested parties to find out who these people were and where they were buried, that sort of thing.

- [Narrator] Stewart says helping to tell the stories of the people buried in these cemeteries is something he's truly proud of.

- I think learning about the stories of the folks who are buried there humanizes them, and you try to put yourself in maybe what they had gone through in their life.

And you wonder how you would have reacted and how you would have been able to get through the same circumstances.

- [Narrator] Now with the grave book as their guide, researchers like Doug McCabe are able to find out the life stories of those buried here.

And in some cases, help families connect to an ancestor they never knew they had, simply by connecting each number to a name and a life story.

- [Adam] My name is Adam Kern.

I'm grave number 251 in cemetery one.

I was buried on November 29th, 1895.

I was as admitted to the asylum in 1874 as patient number nine from Green Township in Hocking County.

My story ended at the asylum, but started in 1864 in Germany, where I was born.

My descendants found me buried here.

Then they started to trace the family line.

- He's always been the missing person.

We could never find out who was the father of my great-grandfather David Henry Kern.

Nobody knew.

Everybody who could know is dead.

And those who might, should've known were never told, so it just ended there.

And my wife is really into genealogy and she started with a death certificate of David Henry and it began from there.

- [Adam] And that led them to Athens, Ohio, and the asylum cemeteries and grave number 251.

- But just to actually go there and see that somebody who was your great-great-grandfather was buried in this cemetery and there's no name and there's no, there's nothing.

It's just, it's a number.

I just felt an obligation, you know, to help make that right, to give him back the dignity that he deserved.

You know, everyone deserves their name on a gravestone.

- [Adam] That lead to a new marker being placed on my grave site, one with my name on it.

- He was a veteran of the Civil War.

He was wounded during the Civil War and fought all four years.

So there's always the possibility of post traumatic stress disorder, which was common back then.

He was a farmer who did a whole lot to try to achieve having a farm and succeeding at it.

In the early 1870s when the big recession hit this area, lasted 16 years.

He lost his farm.

1974, he was committed.

We don't know the specific reason, but they're probably between being a Civil War veteran and having a lot of bad things happening to him all at once.

Something may have broke.

- [Adam] I enlisted in 1861, and was part of the Ohio 17 Voluntary Infantry Regiment.

- We only know for a fact that the mention that he was injured at Missionary Ridge, which was a very fierce engagement.

But his muster roll cards, which we saw, place him with the regiment moving during all this time and through Sherman's march to the sea.

So he had quite an experience.

- If he served for four years in the war, it's hard to tell what happened to him.

It upset me to think that he went through that.

- I'm very proud of him.

He served four years.

He marched, he fought, and he went in a private and he came out of private.

He saw war from a perspective that usually you hear these things described by officers.

So yes, I'm proud of him.

- [Adam] My descendants found records like my military discharge papers at the National Archives, which shows that I suffered a gunshot wound to the left foot.

They also found papers which gave them an idea of what I looked like.

- And there was a description written by somebody and they said he was five foot, 5/8 inches tall.

That makes him 5'11", about my height.

He had brown hair, dark gray eyes, complexion was medium.

His figure was full, stocky, kind of stooped like a farmer.

He had a scar over his right eye and he had a cut over his left thigh in the front.

And since he was wounded at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, he had a shot to his left foot where he had a toe amputated.

The way he's described, I can visualize my grandfather and from the photographs I've seen of my great-grandfather, it would fit the same description.

- [Adam] I was honored during a special ceremony, along with many other war veterans buried at the asylum.

- These veterans served their military commitments and earned honorable discharges.

This is a critical point.

They honored to served their country, and therefore deserve our deepest gratitude.

They did what we asked of them, and in the process suffered all the privations of military service, from being torn from families and work, to living and fighting in difficult environmental conditions, from suffering from painful wounds, both of the physical and mental varieties.

All of these veterans here are buried here because they had post-service mental disabilities, and when they died, no one got them home.

All of the patients buried here were not embalmed.

They were not put in caskets.

They were buried only four feet deep.

And they were marked with only a numbered headstone supplied by the state.

Such a state of affairs for these patients and veterans is at the least embarrassing.

These forgotten people deserve the acknowledgement that they were that, people.

And so today we are gathered here to memorialize and host those found veterans.

- [Man] Aim!

Fire!

(guns firing) - [Adam] And my descendants had an individual ceremony at my grave.

- I came looking, walking down this trail, looking for this number, and stood just by right here.

I was overjoyed.

I found my great-great-grandfather.

I think I knelt right about this spot.

There was not this, this fine marker.

It was just the stone with 251.

I believe there was an anthill right there where I knelt.

I put my hand on the stone and I was so overjoyed to have found him, and then I was almost immediately seized with a sadness because as I started to talk to him, like I hadn't anticipated it, but as I started to talk to him, it just occurred to me that nobody's known he's here.

And he's been here for 125 years.

Adam Kern, Private in Company D, of the Ohio Voluntary Infantry Regiment, number 17.

We thank you for your remarkable service.

Thank you.

- [Adam] I'm no longer just grave 251.

My name is Adam Kern.

- [John] My name is John T. O'Donnell.

- [James] My name is James Hardy.

- [Jane] My name is Jane McFarland.

- [John] And we are all buried in cemetery one at the Athens asylum.

John T. O'Donnell, grave 89.

Buried 1882.

I was admitted to the asylum as patient number 777, from Vinton County on November 26th, 1877.

I am one of two Mexican War veterans buried in the asylum cemeteries.

My story ended at the asylum, but started in Ohio in the early 1800s.

- Interestingly enough, it was said that his insanity was probably hereditary.

Now these days, I think we'd probably all be a lot more skeptical of this charge of hereditary insanity, but certainly back in 1877 when he was admitted, this idea of hereditary insanity, along with hereditary this or that, other kinds of things, was much more popular as a diagnosis.

- [James] James Hardy, grave number 133.

Buried 1886.

I lived until I was 106 years old, and believed to be the oldest patient buried at the asylum.

- Well, James Hardy is very curious, and he was placed in the asylum near the age of 100 and had been living in Nelsonville.

So he was in Athens County in that sense, but to have lived so long.

And in his case, I guess maybe as luck would have it, he was able to live most of his life not in the asylum.

I think his, in his case, it might very well be just severe senility that put him in the asylum.

It also looks like he was the only person to have been born in the 18th century.

So he was born in the late 1700s.

- [Jane] Jane McFarland, grave number 184.

Buried 1896.

My story ended at the asylum, but started in Ohio in the late 1840s.

- She was Presbyterian.

It's very likely that she may not have had anything more than a grade school education.

She was the wife of a farmer and she was from Barlow Township in Washington County.

- [Jane] I was admitted to the asylum on December 31st, 1884 as patient number 1466 from Washington County, after tragedy struck my family.

- Her husband and two of her children had died within two weeks of each other.

- [John] We are no longer just grave numbers in cemetery one.

My name is John T. O'Donnell.

- [James] My name is James Hardy.

- [Jane] And my name is Jane McFarland.

- [Eli] Eli Stevens, grave number 280, cemetery one.

Buried March 23rd, 1898.

I was admitted to the asylum in 1874 as patient number 207.

My story ended at the asylum, but it started in the South where I eventually became a Confederate soldier.

And I ended up in southern Ohio because I came here to fight as part of Morgan's Raid.

- This is John Hunt Morgan, who was a Confederate cavalry general who conducted a raid through southern Illinois and Indiana and southern Ohio in July of 1863.

- They entered into Oh, actually Indiana, and then entered into Ohio in Hamilton, Butler County, and came across the state.

If you look at it from west to east, from the western boundary, Hamilton County, straight on through, and then they hit Vinton County, Gallia County, Jackson County, and eventually, of course, they ended up in Meigs County where the engagement of Buffington Island in Portland, Ohio occurred on July 18th of 1862.

- They did not come through Athens, but went through Nelsonville, and there was a lot of trauma involved in all of that.

And apparently Eli was captured.

- [Eli] After the raid.

I stayed in southeast Ohio, but involved in a conflict of another kind.

- In 1867, Eli is arrested in Vinton County for burning down a church.

And it's one thing to commit arson.

I think that's probably an additional problem when you torch a church.

(chuckling) Anyway, he's caught and put on trial.

It appears from this that he had been an epileptic, I guess he probably still was, but maybe his, his epilepsy episodes had been reduced over time, but it also appears that he was quite a violent character.

At any rate, at the trial he was found guilty, but also insane.

- [Eli] And that's when I found my way to the Athens insane asylum.

- In 1874, when the asylum opened up, and this is for insane people, you know, Eli's a primary candidate for that.

And he was one of the first patients admitted into the asylum.

And he's in the asylum until 1895 when he dies and is buried now in cemetery number one.

For those 21 years that Eli's in the asylum, one has to imagine, and I don't think it takes a whole lot of work at this, but Eli was a Confederate soldier, and is for some of this time at least, the only representative of the Confederacy in the South and the Southern rebellion and so forth in this institution of the Athens asylum.

- [Eli] Little did I know I would be buried next to a Union soldier, one that represents everything the Confederates were against.

- [Israel] Israel Johnson, grave 281, cemetery one.

Buried two months after Eli Stevens.

I was admitted that same year, 1898, as patient 3387.

My story ended at the asylum, but began in 1843.

I was a free black man living in Washington County when I signed up to fight with a Union during the Civil War.

I was a corporal in the 27th United States Colored Troops, one of two colored units from Ohio.

- Both of these regiments became very, very engaged in the Civil War, and both served brilliantly and both had some major, what I call major engagements.

- They participated in a number of minor skirmishes, and then also some major actions, including what's known as the Crater.

This is near Petersburg, the trench lines in 1864 outside of Richmond.

- [Israel] Decades after the war ended, I was sent to the Athens asylum.

- It's in some ways almost too easy to say it was post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury.

It is, and we do know that it can take some time for things to build up under PTSD, but it turns out that Israel was in the asylum for all of a month before he died.

And he too was not claimed.

So here are both Eli and Israel, not claimed.

- [Israel] I was buried right next to a person I once called enemy.

- It is the case that Eli and Israel are buried right next to each other.

And now they both have veteran flag stands at their graves.

And Eli's is certainly the case that he was a Confederate soldier, and Israel's case was that he was a Union soldier.

- The two of them buried next to each other I do not think would be a compatible situation if they were to come out and greet each other.

- In the end here it is two people with probably very different concepts of culture and society buried next to each other.

- [Israel] I am no longer just grave 281.

My name is Israel Johnson.

- [Eli] And I am no longer grave 280.

My name is Eli Stevens.

- [Narrator] As the 1800s come to an end, things start to really change up on the hill in Athens.

- Probably, and certainly the most visible change, and this remains to this day, is the conversion from the Kirkbride Plan to the Cottage Plan.

The idea there was buildings would then be dedicated to different kinds of patients and their needs.

And there was a picture of the building that's now the Konneker Biotech Center and it's labeled the suicide ward.

They're typically two stories high.

The ground floor, if you want to call it that, although it's really a half story above ground, that all these cottages had basements, as did the original complex, but that would be a common area, this first floor area.

And then the second floor would be where the beds and so forth were.

So it was a very different layout than the original complex.

- [Narrator] How the patients are housed isn't the only thing that's different.

How the patients are treated for their illnesses is changing as well.

- Treatments are changing from hydrotherapy, you know, in the old days to more sophisticated therapies, if you will.

This is where we start seeing the electroshock therapy coming along.

- [Narrator] This is all happening around the time Robert Barlow was buried at the asylum cemeteries, but his story doesn't end with a numbered tombstone like many of the others.

He never got one of those.

- [Robert] My name is Robert Barlow, but you can't find my grave in any of the asylum cemeteries.

- He represents somewhere close to a dozen patients who died at the asylum and are not buried at the asylum, but appear in the asylum grave book.

And he's not buried anywhere.

- [Robert] I was admitted to the asylum in 1892 as patient number 2689 from Lawrence County.

I died here in 1906, but I was never buried.

- Upon his death in 1906, his body was given to Ohio University.

And I don't know where he is now.

When there are those who die and the bodies are given to Ohio University, they do not appear to have any relatives at all.

There's just no way of being in contact.

And it also seems as if these are done periodically, okay?

So, you know, you have to wonder if maybe Ohio University, well, we've used up this last body.

Can you get us another one?

- [Robert] I don't have a grave on these grounds or anywhere for that matter, but my name is Robert Barlow, but I wasn't the only one who spent time in the asylum in the early 19th century.

There were many others, and they have their own stories to tell.

- [Mary] My name is Mary Sprouse.

- [Alexandra] My name is Alexandra Nation.

- [Anna] My name is Anna McKee.

- [Alexandra] And we are all buried in the cemeteries at the Athens asylum.

- [Mary] Mary Sprouse, grave 290, cemetery one.

Buried 1908.

I was admitted to the asylum on August 31st, 1906 as patient number 4342 from Ross County.

My story ended at the asylum, but started in the mid-1800s, and I may have been present at one of the biggest events in American history.

- She claimed that she was present at Lincoln's assassination.

And in the record it says that she claimed she was present at Lincoln's assassination in MacArthur, Ohio.

Now that appears to be rather garbled either because of her confusion or confusion by people, say in the court or whatever, who were examining her.

As it turns out, Mary for quite some time, practiced the oldest of female professions in Washington, DC, and was near Ford's Theater on the evening of Lincoln's assassination.

Apparently she was doing her job that night, but became aware very quickly of the assassination attempt and success on Lincoln, as well as other members of his cabinet.

- [Alexandra] Alexandra Nation, grave 303, cemetery one.

Buried 1910.

- If you find the name Alexandra Nation rather unusual, there's a reason for that.

The admission records are very interesting for what they don't have.

To every question asked, the answer is unknown.

- [Alexandra] I was admitted to the asylum in 1901 as patient number 3496 from Vinton County.

My story ended at the asylum and very little is known about where it started.

- She was found wandering in Vinton County and no one knew her.

So she apparently wandered into the county and was wandering around the county and then the authorities picked her up, and she apparently was not communicable in any way.

Instead of given the name Jane Doe or something else, she's given this curious name of Alexandra Nation, and that is the name she has in the grave book.

- [Anna] Anna McKee, grave number 380, cemetery two.

Buried 1915.

I was admitted to the asylum twice, once on June 11th, 1879 as patient number 898 from Meigs County, And again January 12th, 1900 as patient number 3364.

- There's a note on the admission record that she had been seduced about a year beforehand.

She was involved in a sexual encounter, whether it be consensual or not, it could be either actually.

Such a thing was considered very bad from a social standpoint.

- [Anna] We are no longer just grave numbers in the Athens asylum cemeteries.

- [Mary] My name is Mary Sprouse.

- [Alexandra] My name is Alexandra Nation.

- [Anna] My name is Anna McKee.

- [Alice] My name is Alice Mayle.

I am grave number 561 in cemetery two.

I was buried in September of 1929.

I was admitted to the asylum in 1928 as patient number 6869.

My story ended at the asylum, but started in Athens County, Ohio, where I was born and eventually met my first husband.

- She married William Harvey Parmiter, and they had two children that lived in Lodi Township and Earl was the older one, and then my grandmother Zazel Parmiter was their younger one.

- [Alice] We married in 1884, but after 28 years of marriage, the relationship started to fall apart.

- The only picture I have of her and her husband, she's facing away from him.

So I have a feeling of that for a long time they didn't get along that well.

- [Alice] I eventually had an affair and contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

Syphilis.

- After her two children were married, in 1912 Harvey Parmiter divorced Alice and in the divorce action it doesn't say that she gave him syphilis, but that's clear from other things.

- [Alice] I remarried, but suffered another loss.

My daughter Zazel died during the influenza epidemic, and eventually I became a widow, alone again.

And I went to live with Zazel's former husband and his family.

- She was, you know, I suppose a desperate woman.

Here was an old woman who had lost her first husband by divorce and her second husband by death, and she was crippled.

And what else could she do?

- [Alice] But I was an expense Zazel's former husband and family couldn't handle for very long.

- And at some point my grandfather decided that he needed more money if he was gonna keep her.

So he wrote to Earl and said can you send me some money to help pay for your, for your mother?

And Earl wrote back and said I can't afford to send money, but if you send her out here, she can live with us.

- [Alice] I went out to Colorado, but was apparently too much for my son Earl.

- Then my grandfather didn't hear anything more about her until I guess September of 1929, when his wife, showing the paper that Alice Mayle had died in the Athens state hospital, and this is the first they knew about it.

What we learned later was that when she got out to Colorado, Earl discovered that that her syphilis had, had gone into a different stage, I guess.

My grandfather didn't know anything about the syphilis, but he found that, Earl found that he could not keep his mother with his children.

And so he contacted the Colorado State Hospital and they said she wasn't, hadn't been lived there long enough to be eligible.

So he brought her back to Ohio, put her in the Athens state hospital, but never contacted his brother-in-law.

- [Alice] And decades later, my great-grandson found out I was buried up here on the hill under a numbered tombstone and decided to change that.

- I've always felt that my ancestors, particularly the more recent ones, deserve to be remembered.

And I thought, that's one thing I can do.

I can put a stone on her grave.

And I don't know whether people after they die know what we do for them or not.

That's not part of my theology to know, but I felt that if it happened to me, I'd like to have somebody remember me to the point of making sure that there's a stone on my grave.

- [Alice] I am no longer just grave number 561.

My name is Alice Mayle.

- [Narrator] As the 1930s and the Great Depression approached, the asylum in southeastern Ohio were affected just like the rest of the nation.

The Depression created an influx of patients up on the hill.

- For much of this time period until probably the, what, late fifties and into the sixties, all counties in Ohio were to have a county infirmary, or a poor folks home.

And you see also throughout this time period people who had been in the poor folks home being sent to the asylum.

Now what would make the difference?

Well, it would be that their behavior was such that they really could no longer stay in the old folks home or the poor house or whatever else you might want to call it.

And so you see people being brought in for that.

- [Narrator] No matter what they were brought in for, if they died at the asylum and their bodies were unclaimed, they were still buried under a numbered tombstone until the 1940s.

- In 1943, the state finally started to put up headstones that had the name of the patient.

And for a while, it was just the death year.

And then around maybe 1945 or so, they began to put the name, birth year, death year.

- [Narrator] But many people were buried in the cemeteries in the mid-1900s before the change was made, and were still only identified by a number.

- [Arthur] My name is Arthur D. James.

- [Edward] And my name is Edward Lee Hardwick.

And we are both buried in the Athens asylum cemeteries.

- [Arthur] I, Arthur James, am grave number 796 in cemetery two.

I was buried in 1932.

I was admitted to the asylum in 1918 as patient number 6234 from Jackson County.

My story ended at the asylum, but started in Youngstown, Ohio in the 1870s.

And I eventually fought for the U.S. in the Spanish-American War.

- Enlisted as a private in Cleveland, Ohio in the United States Army.

Then actually specifically in Company A of the 7th Cavalry of Custer fame.

(chuckling) And then was actually discharged while serving in Cuba in April of 1899.

- [Edward] I, Edward Lee Hardwick, in grave number 1103, in cemetery three.

I was admitted to the asylum in 1946 as patient number 11829 from Vinton County.

My story ended at the asylum, but I was born in Kentucky and eventually ended up in southeastern Ohio.

- He's one of the lucky ones when it comes to the asylum cemeteries because his headstone has his name and his birth year and his death year.

By looking at the 1900 census, we can find that he was 14 years old at that time in 1900 and a resident of Point Township in Pulaski County, Kentucky.

He was not able to read a write.

1930 census shows him as 38, and a resident of Chester Township in Meigs County.

So he's moved from Kentucky to Meigs County, and he's now a farmer.

And according to that 1930 census, he was able to read and write.

- [Arthur] We are no longer just grave numbers in the Athens asylum cemeteries.

My name is Arthur D. James.

- [Edward] And my name is Edward Lee Hardwick.

- [Viola] Viola Rapp, grave 607, cemetery two.

Buried 1934.

I was admitted to the asylum in 1929 as patient number 7074 from Ross County.

My story ended at the asylum, but began in the early 1900s.

I was the child of a southern Ohio farmer.

- She was born in 1908, and she was the second child of Lulu and William Cottrell.

- [Viola] I was one of eight children and I experienced some tragic losses, including losing my best friend, who was also my sister.

- Her older sister, her name was Rosa.

Rosa died when she was like 13 years old.

So my grandmother Viola would have only been around 11.

- [Viola] A few years after Rosa died, I got married, but it wasn't to a man I chose.

It was to a man my father chose for me.

- At 16 she was married to my grandfather, who was like 11 years older.

She had a baby at seven months gestational age that only lived about 10 hours, 'cause he was premature and they'd both taken enough nutrition or unable to make it.

And then about a year later she had another son Russell, actually Luther Russell, but we called him Russell, and he was born with some health problems.

It's within six months of that in December of 1929 that she was admitted to the hospital.

- [Viola] Daughter Dorothy was very young.

Four and a half when I was taken to the asylum.

- I was a little girl, and my mother was ending sick or whatever you want to call it, That I, she was put here in the hospital, and I did not get to come to see her.

I mean, I got to at first, and then she got sick.

And so it made it rough.

But she's always been in my mind, my heart and my soul.

- [Viola] I was depressed.

Some think I was brought to the asylum to deal with what people today refer to as postpartum depression.

- Nowadays, you know, we know how to help people when they have things like that.

There's medication, there's therapy.

We have support groups.

And back then they didn't have the support system that people can get now.

They didn't have those things.

- With her and other people, they need to be known because it's not their fault.

It's just that health-wise or whatever happened in their lives made it that way.

- [Viola] While I was in the hospital, my husband lost custody of the children, and Dorothy ended up in an orphanage in Pickaway County.

I died when I contracted tuberculosis at the asylum in 1934, and Dorothy wasn't permitted to come to my burial.

- I knew my mother was dead 'cause they did tell me.

Some official, but I didn't know who it was, wanted to come and pick me up and take me to see my mother before she was gone, you know.

Before they put her in the ground.

And so that was no, that was something that really at that time when you're told no, you can't go to see your mother.

You can't.

So from that time on I just more or less blocked everything out.

- [Viola] Decades later when questions popped up about what happened to me, Dorothy and her own children did some research.

They tracked me down and found my grave.

- I'm glad she is in a resting place where she is, where we, her family, or any other family, could come and see.

- [Viola] Memorial Day, 2010.

A ceremony is being held to honor me and others buried in the asylum cemeteries.

For Dorothy, who is now in her late eighties, it's the funeral for me she never got to experience.

Even though it's difficult for her to get to my grave, this ceremony is closure for her and it's emotional.

- [Dorothy] It's beautiful.

Mom, this is the best day of your life.

And mine.

(Dorothy crying) (solemn music) Good Lord, thank you.

(Dorothy crying) Okay, all right.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lord, for the help you have given my mother and my family all these years.

And blessing, and blessing go with her always.

Amen.

(Dorothy crying) - [Woman] It's all right, don't cry.

- [Viola] I'm no longer just grave 607.

My name is Viola Rapp.

- [Narrator] Nearly 30 years after Viola was laid to rest, big changes were on the horizon for the asylum.

- In 1963, the Congress passed the Community Health Centers Act to get away from the large institutions where the mentally ill had been housed to encourage the idea that people should be cared for in the community, as opposed to being cared for in what some people refer to as warehouses.

- [Narrator] Another change was underway as well.

The asylum policy was to use patients to do some of the work that needed to be done around the institution.

- In the seventies a court case made it pretty much impossible for state institutions like that to use inmates or patients to do labor.

- These patients were not being paid when they were doing work.

And there was quite a push to say, well, they should be paid at least minimum wage or whatever.

And the state said, well, we can't afford that.

- [Narrator] And slowly, the number of patients decreased, which led to the end of state asylums like the one on the hill in Athens.

- So the census of the Athens Mental Health Center just went down, down, down, down, down.

So from its peak in the mid-fifties, near 2000, it went down to its census when it closed in 1993 of less than a hundred.

- [Narrator] The last burial in the asylum cemeteries was in 1972.

Ohio University ended up purchasing the asylum and cemeteries from the state in the early 1990s.

- The state, as the population, as the census decreased, was looking for people or institutions that would be willing to take on a white elephant.

So I think that there was a combination of things that the university thought there was some benefit to it to take this on.

The state could see that as a transfer from one state entity to another.

- [Narrator] A couple of decades later, the mystery surrounding the people buried in the asylum cemeteries is coming to an end as well.

And state leaders are noticing the work being done to link numbered tombstones with names, and the way the actual graves and cemeteries have been cleaned up and taken care of.

Some even attend the ceremonies held at the asylum cemeteries each Memorial Day.

- This cemetery is in my opinion, one of the finest examples of reclamation in the nation.

- I love the reference to it being like the one in DC, the Arlington Cemetery, because that is what you think about when you come here.

- Whether it be Arlington or the ones at Gettysburg, there are rows of stones look very much like this, and to come to a place like this where there was such respect for the people buried here, and that's what struck me more than anything, the incredible respect that the reclamation project gave to the people buried here and the appearance of the cemetery, the serenity, the peacefulness, and the fact that it stands as something that Ohio has, it's a jewel of Ohio for people with mental illness.

- [Frances] We are better in the way we look after each other than we were then, and that's a very hopeful thing.

And I hope that those who have mental illnesses recognize how much we value human life, including theirs.

- [Narrator] And if those buried here know what's being done now, hopefully they recognize that we know they are people with families, with life stories, and now we know their names.

(upbeat acoustic music)