Christi and I left Villisca and headed for Clarinda. No mass murders there, thankfully! But it was a place we’d both been once before.

We first visited in 2012 after I arranged a visit to what began as the Clarinda State Hospital (CSH) in 1885. By 2012, the name had changed to the Clarinda Treatment Complex (CTC). The huge rambling building (500,000 square feet) only had about 50 or so geriatric patients still living there, along with a school for delinquent youths called the Clarinda Academy

Why did I want to visit a mental institution? One of my own ancestors lived in such an institution in Athens, Ohio during his final years, which I wrote about in 2014. That made me curious and such places are usually off limits to the public. In 2012, the CTC had a museum devoted to its past that could be toured if you contacted them. So that’s what we did. I didn’t take many photos but the ones I did take have been lost.

This photo of Clarinda State Hospital from 1908 gives one a better idea of just how big the place was. (Photo source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.)

Brandon Hunter, who was in charge of activities for the geriatric patients, showed us around the facility. The museum was enlightening, featuring some of the outdated devices used for psychiatric treatment. The facility itself was full of windows and let in lots of light. It was not a dreary place in general. The only place I did not like was when Brandon took us to where they kept recycling until collection day, the former solitary cells for what I took to be possibly violent patients (no longer used, thankfully). They were dark and scary, and we got out of there as soon as possible.

A postcard of the Clarinda State Hospital’s “Amusement Hall”. It looked quite different when we saw it in 2012. They still had an ancient movie projector gathering dust.

The CTC closed in 2015, deemed too large and too empty to keep operating. Clarinda residents fought to keep it open because it did employ a number of people, including several farmers who provided food. But Iowa’s legislature said no and it closed.

This view of the building only shows one very small part of a huge complex.

We drove to the main building first and it looked very much as it did in 2012. No plans for it seem imminent. According to a 2017 article, substance abuse treatment center Zion Recovery is using part of the building. The basement kitchens are still being used by the nearby prison. Also on campus is the Clarinda Academy, a facility for delinquent youth sent from across the country which was in the news recently for troubling reasons. So its future is in question as well.

The CSH was the third asylum built in Iowa, with plans to house alcoholics, geriatrics, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the criminally insane. An act of the Twentieth General Assembly of the State of Iowa authorized the appropriation of $150,000 for that purpose. Building began in 1885, with a section for men opening in 1888. Women patients arrived later.

The building’s design follows several other mental institutions built in the Victorian era originally thought up by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, a style now known as the Kirkbride plan. He envisioned an asylum with a central administration building flanked by two wings comprised of tiered wards.

Respected for his accomplishments by his peers, Kirkbride was also reviled by a younger generation of doctors who viewed his influence and devotion to his beliefs as obstacles to progress in psychiatric medicine. (Photo source: Portrait by Howard Russell Butler)

This “linear plan” followed a segregation of residents according to sex and symptoms of illness. Male patients were housed in one wing, female patients in the other. Each wing was sub-divided by ward with the more “excited” patients placed on the lower floors, farthest from the central administrative structure, and the better-behaved, more rational patients situated in the upper floors and closer to the administrative center.

Ideally, this arrangement was intended to make patients’ asylum experience more comfortable and productive by isolating them from other patients with illnesses antagonistic to their own while still allowing fresh air, natural light, and views of the asylum grounds from all sides of each ward.

Brandon told us that while many asylums had very bad reputations, Clarinda was better than most in treating its patients humanely. But like many asylums, overcrowding caused lots of problems until the advent of psychotropic medications like lithium made the need for institutions less pressing.

Also, as I learned from my research about the Athens Asylum, anyone could be committed to a mental asylum in those days for several reasons. If you were tired of caring for your elderly parent, you could drop him or her off at the asylum with few questions asked. Epileptics, post-partum mothers, disobedient teens…all were possible candidates for residency.

Find a Grave lists about 1,200 for the Clarinda Treatment Complex Cemetery. But only 17 percent are photographed.

I didn’t have time to visit the cemetery in 2012 so it was a “must do” this time. Unlike other mental institutions that have cemeteries featuring only a marker with a number, Clarinda’s cemetery has stones with actual names and death years on them. There are even a few markers scattered about that were provided by families.

Most of the stones at the CTC Cemetery only have a date and name on them.

The cemetery is located about a quarter of a mile from the main building between a large cornfield and a cow pasture. The cows were quite intrigued with us and came over to see what we were up to.

The cows actually stopped what they were doing around the pasture and moseyed over to check us out.

Knowing few of these small markers were photographed, I took pictures of as many as I could. Some had faded so greatly that you couldn’t make out the name or date. But I added what I could read to Find a Grave later and looked up some of the stories written about them.

This particular marker for George M. Bird (1842-1912) indicates he did have family that cared about him. Born in 1842 in Illinois, George enlisted in Company A of the Iowa 12th Infantry Regiment on Oct. 17, 1861 at the age of 19. It appears he never married.

Union veteran George Bird spent the last months of his life at Clarinda State Hospital.

George appears in the 1900 U.S. Census as living with his sister, Jerusia Steen, and her family in Watkins, Okla. as an invalid. He was still living with his sister and her husband in 1910 in Harrison County, Iowa. George’s veteran administration records indicate he began receiving a pension in 1892, listing that he had a “disease of the chest” and is also marked “imbecile”.

I don’t know what George’s exact cause of death was. Only that he likely only spent the last year or so at Clarinda State Hospital (CSH). It’s possible Jerusia and her husband, getting older themselves, could no longer care for him.

Many of the people buried in the cemetery that I researched were elderly and only spent the last few years of their lives at CSH, with “exhaustion from psychosis” being listed as past of their cause of death. However, there was a pair of stones beside each other for William J. Dunlap and Elizabeth Dunlap that puzzled me. I think they may be siblings but I am not certain.

William Dunlap entered CSH when he was 28 years old. Did his sister join him four years later?

William J. Dunlap was born in 1861 somewhere in Iowa. His death certificate lists him as having been a farmer and a schoolteacher in Ringgold, Iowa when he entered the Clarinda State Hospital in December 1888. He was 28 at the time. Listed as single, he lived there for 45 years until his death on Jan. 7, 1934 from “exhaustion from psychosis” and “cerebral arteriosclerosis”.

Elizabeth Dunlap, born in 1866, is also listed as a schoolteacher from Ringgold, Iowa when she entered CSH in 1892. She was 26 at the time. Listed as single, she lived there for 41 years before dying on Nov. 3, 1933 of lobar pneumonia. This was only about two months before William died.

Elizabeth Dunlap entered Clarinda State Hospital four years after William Dunlap.

I could not find out anything about William or Elizabeth’s parents, neither of them appears in census records before their time at CSH. Because they are listed as being single, school teachers from Ringgold, and are buried next to each other, I think they must have been siblings. At least in once record, Elizabeth is listed as insane on an Iowa state census record. I like to think perhaps that if they were brother and sister, they took comfort from each other’s presence over the years.

There are many more stories to share from Clarinda. I hope you’ll join me next time to learn about them.

I’m standing beside the grave of John Sheridan Smith, who died at the age of 28 on Nov. 9, 1918. It’s possible he died of the Spanish Influenza sweeping the country at the time.