A Tale of Two Cemeteries / New School Talk Announcement
Last week when Peter and I were driving back from Cleveland/Meadville we decided to take back roads up to the Thruway. I had especially wanted to go through North Warren, PA to see the Warren State Hospital. It is only about an hour from Meadville and is a really amazing facility.
It is still an active psychiatric hospital so I wasn’t allowed to photograph, but I was actually more interested in the cemetery.
I have written often about the issue of names in relation to my suitcases project. Especially how the State of New York prohibits the use of full names of the patients in respect to my work and in regards to the hospital cemeteries.
Here in Pennsylvania patient’s names are on the grave stones.
If you were to drive north about 60 miles into New York State and go to the cemetery at the Gowanda Psychiatric Center, you will find an entirely different story.
While there are a few graves marked with names, the vast majority only have numbers. This is mostly due to New York State’s primitive privacy laws, which supposedly protect families from the “shame” of having a relative who was institutionalized.
There are groups throughout New York that are working very hard to memorialize patients who are buried in hospital cemeteries. There is a lovely Helen Keller quote on the memorial stone above, and this cemetery is very well maintained.
It just seems so wrong to me that New York State continues to stigmatize folks who were patients at state hospitals by basically denying anyone (including families) the knowledge that they existed. Here is a link to another post I did that gives a bit more background on the issue of names. Just don’t try to contact John B. Allen at NYS OMH. He no longer works there.
Thanks for following. I’ll be presenting the suitcases project at the New School on Thursday the 12th of September at 6:00 PM. Here is a link to the announcement, but as of today, the time listed is off. I start speaking at 6:00 and it ends at 8:00. I really hope to see some of you there. It will be interesting.
Willard Suitcases / Agnes J
Earlier today I uploaded Agnes J’s case to the willardsuitcases.com site. (Go to “The Cases” and click the link on her name.) She is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that her satchel contained a wealth of correspondence that revealed so much about her life. Hers was the first case that I shot with so much personal information.
There is a line in the letter below that explains so much about her being sent to Willard.
“But don’t come back to the Y.W. and threaten to kill that girl again–that’s what put you where you are now.” Chilling and so sad.
She started this letter to President Hover [sic] while she was a patient at Warren State Hospital which is very near to where I grew up.
So please check out her two cases on the suitcases site. And I’d like to welcome all the new readers to this site. Something was published somewhere on the net that linked to my project, and I have been getting lots of interesting emails from people in the past few days. If you want to see all of my wordpress posts about the project, just click here, and welcome.
Jon Crispin's Notebook 
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