Oddsconsin...where we explore peculiar and sometimes mysterious features of Wisconsin’s human landscape.
All that remains of the Outagamie County Asylum are the stone bridge across an unnamed creek and the old cemetery.
The asylum opened near Appleton in 1890 as the Outagamie County Asylum for the Chronic Insane. It survived for over a century, with the number of patients peaking at about 250. It closed in 2000 and the asylum complex was razed. The bridge and cemetery are accessible to the public via a trail from a parking lot northwest of the county medical center (Brewster Village) on Brewster St. The asylum stood just south of the parking lot.
Old postcards show the asylum as a two-story cream-brick Italianate building. It had symmetrical wings flanking a central entrance pavilion topped with a cupola. Historic air photos show numerous outbuildings, roads, groves of trees and agricultural fields. The setting was rural.
In this era, when mental illness was poorly understood, asylum patients might have included individuals diagnosed with dementia praecox, hysteria, neurasthenia or psychasthenia – vague terms for ailments no longer recognized in psychiatry. According to historic plaques on the grounds, the asylum also housed individuals diagnosed with alcoholism, epilepsy, excessive worry, mental deficiency and even homosexuality.
Once committed to the asylum, few patients ever left. Psychiatric treatments – including electro-shock therapy – were harsh by today’s standards. Until the modern era, asylum staff was primarily custodial, with no in-house medical professionals. Medical procedures were sometimes done by staff with little training.
One medical procedure – forced sterilization – led to the resignation (and perhaps the suicide) of the asylum’s first superintendent, George Downer, in 1914. The mayor of Appleton at the time, James Canavan, was also implicated. Only a year later, forced sterilization of inmates of asylums became legal in Wisconsin. By 1933, almost 500 sterilization operations – mostly on women – had been performed in the state.
Sterilization was a measure advocated by eugenicists, who believed in selective human breeding, including preventing the reproduction of those seen as "unfit." Eugenics was a mainstream idea within the progressive movement at the time. As shown in an article by Ella Saph, its advocates even included Charles Van Hise, the University of Wisconsin geology professor credited with first articulating the "Wisconsin Idea."
Outagamie's asylum patients were also seen as a financial obligation to the state and, unless unable to, were expected to carry their own weight through cooking and cleaning. They also maintained the farm, which eventually had over 500 acres of land and a herd of dairy cows. Surplus produce was sold to the local community. The administration’s emphasis on turning a profit led to another scandal and the resignation of a second superintendent, Thomas Flanagan, in the 1940s, following complaints of abuse and over-work of asylum patients.
The asylum cemetery – now called the Outagamie County Cemetery – holds the bodies of at least 133 former patients who died at the asylum between 1891 and 1949. The cemetery is on an isolated parcel of land completely surrounded by a semitrailer training track on the campus of Fox Valley Technical College. Burial locations were identified in 2014 by Professor Peter Peregrine and his students from nearby Lawrence University, who conducted a geophysical survey of the cemetery.
Like other asylum cemeteries in the state (see Oddsconsin #2) there were originally numbered stones to identify grave locations, but these have disappeared. All that remains are a few markers indicating rows of burials. A stone plaque with the names of the patients buried in the cemetery was placed by community members when the cemetery was rededicated in 2015.
With the nearby semitrailers and the traffic noise from I-41 just to the west, it’s difficult to imagine that the cemetery was once quiet and serene. One lingering question is, where did the numbered stone gravestones go? And why were they numbers, rather than names, in the first place? Was it for administrative efficiency, to reduce costs, or to protect the identities of the patients who were buried there?