COLUMNISTS

An institution for lunatics

During the drive from near Little Rock to my new home construction site south of Benton I pass by what was formerly a state mental institution. The attractive and orderly rows of red brick buildings remind me that when I was growing up in rural western Arkansas, the name Benton was synonymous with “mental institution.” But that facility was not opened until June 1936, and by then the Arkansas State Lunatic Asylum in Little Rock already had a long history.

Like so much of Arkansas’ public service infrastructure, a state mental institution grew out of a movement that began during Reconstruction following the Civil War. Traditionally, early Arkansas followed what the late psychiatry professor and historian Dr. Fred O. Henker called “the ancient practice of family responsibility and of family maintenance with incarceration in jail or poorhouse for the violently mad . . .”

A particularly tragic example of this early family treatment for mental illness was the case of James Black, the blacksmith credited with making the original Bowie knife in Washington,Ark. Following the death of his wife in 1835, Black’s mental condition was worsened by a beating at the hands of his disgruntled father-in-law, William Shaw. Shaw then managed to get guardianship of Black, his children, and his estate. Eventually abandoned by Shaw, Black was declared a pauper in 1841, and his care fell to kindly neighbors. Stories tell of the blind and disturbed Black being chained to a wall to keep him under control.

Reconstruction Gov. Powell Clayton, who has traditionally been demonized in Arkansas history as a venal carpetbagger, called for the creation of a state mental asylum in 1871. Two years later the Legislature created the Arkansas State Lunatic Asylum with an appropriation of $50,000 for land and a building. Republican Reconstruction ended in 1874 with only a site being acquired, located in the hills west of Little Rock near where the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences campus is now located.

The conservative “redeemer Democrats” gave lip service to the asylum, but it was 1881 before funds were appropriated to construct and operate the asylum. Completed in 1882, the large red brick building was an imposing four-story structure with a central administrative unit and radiating wings for housing patients. One patient later described the building as “a large brick structure with many ells and additions. Many green vines had entwined themselves on the sides of the high brick walls, and were running high up among the windows of the different stories . . .”

Little Rock lawyer and fiction writer George B. Rose described the facility in a short story as “reminding me somewhat of the pictures of the Spanish Escurial [the seat of the Spanish King], and having something of the same sinister aspect.”

The first superintendent of the asylum was Dr. C.C. Forbes, and his wife served as the first matron. Forbes received his first patient, a Washington County woman, on Feb. 26, 1883. As Dr. Henker has written, “There followed such a deluge from private homes, poorhouses, and jails that the original capacity of 250 patients was exceeded within six months. Wings were added symmetrically . . . but were also soon overcrowded. This was the story for the next seventy years.” At first, patients were not segregated by race, but that changed as the Jim Crow era settled in.

Early patients, who could only be accepted after referral by two physicians and with the consent of the county or probate judge, were given mental and physical examinations and classified as to mental afflictions. Classifications evolved over time, with many of the early patients suffering from various types of dementia or mania. Beginning in 1892, various types of insanity were assigned, such as delusional insanity and a few cases of “masturbational insanity.” A surprising number of the patients suffered from “psychosis with pellagra.” One of the most fascinating sources about the early asylum was published in 1902 by a former patient, James Cooke Warde. The book’s title tells it all: Jimmy Warde’s Experience as a Lunatic: A True Story. A Full Account of what I thought, saw, heard, did, and experienced just before and during my confinement of 180 days as a lunatic in the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum.

Warde’s story is painful. He admits early in the book: “I don’t mean to say that I didn’t go crazy, but let’s wait and see where I went the craziest-inside the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum or outside of it.” Warde believed he was tricked into going to the asylum with the promise of a diagnosis, but soon “Slam! Bang! Clang!-a double iron door was closed behind me. I soon saw that I was in the midst of all kinds of crazy people.”

Warde was eventually released. He later gained a note of fame for building and flying his own airplane.

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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Pulaski County. Email him at [email protected].

Editorial, Pages 84 on 10/06/2013

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