Confessing My Eastern State Roots

Sometimes you wonder if you’re crazy. The older you get, though, the easier it is to laugh at yourself. Old age. I can remember my paternal grandmother, Clemmie Forrest Lewis (1902-1990), of Hudgins in Mathews, making jokes about craziness. When I was a little girl and she was my age, back in the 1960s when I was growing up in Gloucester, she would cackle about someone doing something worthy of being sent to “Dunbar” or, alternately, to “Williamsburg.”

It would be a while before I understood that this was a reference to Eastern State, a hospital for the mentally ill, in Williamsburg, about an hour’s drive from my childhood home. And Williamsburg is the town where I’ve lived now for the last 40 years. In the 20th century, Dunbar was a farm about two miles away where crops were raised to feed the patients and where some were sent for exercise and rehabilitation. Beginning in 1936, as urged by the Williamsburg Restoration (later, Colonial Williamsburg), buildings were constructed at the farm and patients were slowly, slowly shifted from the downtown Williamsburg location. In 1966, there were still four patient buildings downtown. Finally, the last patients were moved to the Dunbar Farms campus in 1970.

My Nana must have had some real-life experience with mental illness and Eastern State Hospital. Her husband, my grandfather, had three aunts who were committed and died there. They probably weren’t the only people from Mathews and Gloucester to be sent to “Williamsburg.” Why else would my Sunday School class have been taken all the way to Eastern State Hospital (Dunbar location) to sing carols at Christmas? I shiver. This memory is creepy . . . and sad.

The Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds was established in 1770. It was a progressive move, yet the place was referred to locally during the 18th and early 19th centuries as the asylum, bedlam house, lunatic hospital, and madhouse. Not exactly politically correct, by today’s standards. In 1861 the Public Hospital was renamed Eastern Lunatic Asylum and in 1894 it was renamed again, Eastern State Hospital, since by that time “lunatic” was generally recognized as having unkind overtones. For more on the institution, read Colonial Williamsburg’s research report that covers the subject from the organization’s genesis in 1766 until a fire destroyed the original colonial building and others in 1885. 

In addition to the three paternal-side aunts mentioned above, I have another relative on my maternal side who was committed in 1880. Alice Machen (1858-1918) was the sister-in-law of my 4th cousin, 3 times removed, Willie Miller Machen (1859-1935). By the time Alice arrived at the age of 22, Eastern Lunatic Asylum had undergone quite a bit of expansion after the Civil War. Many new buildings made up the campus. The “female department” was located in building C (see plan, right) and another female building, M, was completed in 1883. Alice surely lived in one or both of these. Four years after she arrived, Consolidated Electric Light installed electric lighting in the hospital buildings.

Five years after her committal, she may have been rescued from building C, where a passerby saw flames leaping out of a window at 10:30 p.m. In an account of the June 7, 1885 fire published two days later in the Richmond Dispatch we learn:

“Dr. Moncure rushed through the smoke, reached the room of the inmate nearest the fire, and picking her up in his arms, carried her out to the veranda at the southeast angle of the building and there turned her over to an employee. Quickly returning, he carried back another, and his efforts were seconded by others, so that in a brief space of time there were no inmates left in the immediate neighborhood of the fire.”

The females were taken to the “old College building” and “the inmates in the male department had been turned out, and were straying around.” Since there was no fire department in Williamsburg, an urgent message was sent to the Richmond fire department, about 50 miles west. In the meantime, staff and volunteers from town used hoses and wet blanket to fight the fire, until someone suggested a portion of a building be blown up to stop the fire's advance to the rest. It worked. In the end, the 1770 hospital building and four others (see plan: buildings A, C, D, E, and F) were destroyed and four (buildings I, L2, M, & N), possibly 5 (building J), survived. The Richmond fire department arrived by train at 3 a.m., but it took several hours to unload the horses and steam engine. They arrived in time to water down the smoldering ruins. The hospital superintendent fed them breakfast and they were back in Richmond by the afternoon.

Then, it was time to round up the patients, some of whom were feared lost in the fire. It had been hard to keep the female patients from wandering off, said one helper. They kept trying to find their way back to their building. Finally, all were found, some taken in by kindly Williamsburg residents. No lives were lost and the fire was blamed on the new electric lights.

The hospital resumed operations on Francis Street, located one block from, and parallel to, the Duke of Gloucester Street, which had been fashioned nearly 200 years earlier as a grand one-mile-long avenue between The College of William and Mary and Virginia’s colonial capitol building. After the American Revolution, Virginia’s government offices moved from Williamsburg to Richmond, but the Lunatic Asylum continued to serve those whom its founder, Virginia Governor Fauquier, called the “poor unhappy set of People who are deprived of their Senses and wander about the Country, terrifying the Rest of their Fellow Creatures.” While Alice was a patient, Eastern State became Williamsburg’s largest employer.

Alice died of tuberculosis in 1918, thirty-eight years after her committal and at the age of 60. Her death certificate indicates that her parents’ names were unknown. Perhaps this key information had been lost in the fire? Or simply with time? Her “occupation” at the institution was listed as “seamstress.” Alice also suffered from pellagra, a condition caused by lack of niacin, related to a corn-heavy diet and prevalent in the turn of the century South. Pellagra is said to be characterized by the 4 Ds: diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death. Because of her length of stay at Eastern State, it is likely that Alice suffered from some sort of mental disorder. The diseases followed, caused by lifestyle and infection while she was a patient. She is most likely buried in an unmarked grave in the Eastern State Cemetery on South Henry Street, now closed to visitors, surrounded by an iron gate.

Although the hospital had no records of Alice’s family, I know a bit about them due to that modern miracle: the Internet. Her father was William Machen (1812-1879) whose first wife was Mary Fleet (Abt. 1820-Abt. 1850). They lived with her parents, Henry and Elizabeth Fleet, a few houses away from my second-great grandparents, Edmond and Harriet Jones of North who lived on Back Water Creek. William was a ship joiner. The 1860 census finds him in Portsmouth, Virginia, working as a carpenter and living with his second wife, who was half his age. He must have been doing reasonably well because his real estate was valued at $4,000 and his personal property at $5,000. Alice’s mother was Margaret R. Snead (Abt. 1835-1900). The Portsmouth household included two sons by Mary Fleet, ages 18 and 10, and two children by Margaret Snead, Charles, age 4, and little Alice Machen, age 1. In 1870, after the Civil War, they were back in Mathews where William was a farmer owning real estate valued at $2,500. Alice, Charles, and one of their step-brothers made up the household. Among their neighbors were the Ruffs, mentioned in an earlier blog post, as well as another of my second-great grandfathers, Joseph F. Foster, Sr. and his family.

William’s death in 1879 must have been a blow to the household. The 1880 census finds Charles, age 24, farming, while his mother, 45, is “housekeeping” and sister, Alice, 22, is “at home.” Margaret’s 50-year-old sister-in-law also lived with them. Because Alice’s death certificate said she had been at Eastern State for 38 years, she was probably committed sometime later that census year. Also, according to marriage records, Charles Machen and my cousin, Willie Anne Miller. were married in December of 1880.

The 1890 U.S. Census records were nearly all destroyed in a fire in 1921, so we don’t know what happened to Margaret Machen and her sister-in-law during the last years of the Gilded Age. But the fin de siècle, an age of rapid economic growth in America, was indeed the end of an era for this family. In 1900, Margaret died, according to her obituary, “a widow lady . . . at the home of her son, Mr. C. M. Machen, Forty-second Street” in Norfolk. Just two months later, “Mr. Charles Machen, a resident of Lambert’s Point,” died after a five-week illness. According to his obituary, “He belonged to a very prominent family in Mathews county, and removed from there last Christmas.” The 1900 census, taken in December, shows Charles’ wife, Willie, living in Norfolk with seven children, ages 3 to 18. If she knew anything about her sister-in-law Alice, she may have been too busy to be involved.   

In 1926, less than ten years after Cousin Alice’s death and before the arrival of the first of my three paternal aunts at Eastern State Hospital, the Restoration of Williamsburg began. The Rector of Bruton Parish Church, the Reverend Doctor W.A.R. Goodwin, brought the importance of the city to the attention of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who supplied funds to launch the massive project. Located a block from Duke of Gloucester Street, Eastern State was in the way.

According to a January 13, 1936 article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The hospitals have been overcrowded and in need of improvements . . . for several years . . . The plan is to move eventually the whole hospital from Williamsburg to the Dunbar farm . . .” The Rockefellers contributed $25,000 toward removal of the first unit “so the guests of the projected hotel may not be disturbed by the cries of the louder patients.” The hotel, to be located about a half mile away on Francis Street (The Williamsburg Inn), was needed to accommodate the thousands of tourists visiting the restoration, they said. By 1940, four new buildings were erected at Dunbar Farm, ready to house 500 people, less than half of the patients.

The other state institution in downtown Williamsburg, The College of William and Mary, wasn’t as eager to see the hospital move. Students from William and Mary and other schools studied abnormal psychology and medical law there. Students used a large hall at Eastern State for dances and hospital facilities were also used for community concerts and events. In any case, World War II interrupted progress on moving Eastern State as well as developments at Williamsburg Restoration. It wasn’t until the 1950s that funds were budgeted by the state, nudged by a generous Rockefeller incentive, and building began anew at Dunbar.

My paternal great grandmother, Elnora Davis Lewis (1860-1913), was a contemporary of Alice Machen, although she was born on the other side of Mathews County in the Piankatank District. She was the first child of Larkin Davis (About 1840-After 1877) and Sarah Elizabeth Winder (1835-1926). By 1870, the Davises had three more children, two sons and another daughter, Ida Virginia, age 3. And they were poor. Their real estate was valued at $100 and their personal property at $100. By 1880, they had added another son and another daughter, Sarah, age 3. The 1880 census also noted that Sarah, the mother, had rheumatism. No one in the household could read or write. Elnora’s younger siblings, Ida and Sarah, would spend their final days at Eastern State Hospital.

Great grandaunt Ida Virginia Davis (1869-1963) lived a long life. She married Benjamin Franklin Thompson (1853-1946) and the couple had three boys and two girls. At the age of 73, her youngest son, Ernest Jefferson Thompson (1901-1942), was lost at sea off of Cape Hatteras when his merchant ship, the SS Norvana, was torpedoed by a German submarine. A few years later, in 1946 at the age of 77 and suffering from heart disease, Ida was committed to Eastern State. Ida’s sibling, Sarah Elizabeth Davis (1877-1955) also lived a long life before being taken to Eastern State in 1951. While Ida raised her family in Mathews, Sarah moved in Norfolk with her first husband, Judson Hodges (1877-1909), also of Mathews and captain of the tugboat Portsmouth. Not long after moving, they had daughters, who were ages 2 and 3 when Judson died in Hampton Roads harbor in a tugboat accident. Sarah remarried Marion Williams, a barge captain, who moved into the Hodges home at 508 Poole Street, where they lived for over 40 years. According to items in the newspaper social columns, Sarah took trips back to Mathews frequently to visit her mother and siblings.

Also in the social pages, I found an interesting clip from October 3, 1954. “Mrs. Luther F. Thompson, Mrs. William P. Lewis of Hallieford, and A.L. Davis of Gloucester Point spent Friday in Williamsburg.” These were the daughter-in-law and daughter of Ida and the brother of Ida and Sarah. I wonder, were the women taking their uncle to visit Ida and Sarah? Were Ida and Sarah at the downtown or Dunbar Farm campus of Eastern State? Did the visitors take a stroll down the Duke of Gloucester Street, through Colonial Williamsburg, while they were in town?

The Daily Press tells us that in 1953, “The Eastern State Hospital is an overcrowded institution” with a rated capacity for 1,846 patients and 2,089 actual patients. “Even its four buildings erected at Dunbar nearly two decades ago are 25% over capacity with 500 patients in quarters provided for 400.” Another article in 1956 said that “aged women patients make most of the hospital’s towels,” when reporting on progressive forms of therapy at the institution. Overcrowding continued to be a hot topic in 1961 when the newspaper headline proclaimed, “Eastern State Crowding: Problem is Aging.” One third of the hospitals 2,400 patients were said to be elderly. “While Eastern State is specifically intended to care for mental illness . . . , it . . . has had to take on care of the aged . . . because the persons involved could not afford private facilities . . .” Was Eastern State the best option for the Davis sisters because they were aged, not mentally ill? Because Ida went into the hospital first, did Sarah choose to be with her sister when she needed additional care too?

Sarah died first, at the age of 77, after just 4 years, 2 months, and 13 days at the institution. According to her death certificate, she died of lobar pneumonia in 1955. It is not clear why she was committed. Her second husband, Marion, died two years after she was committed. The 1953 Norfolk City Directory shows that Sarah and Judson Hodges's oldest daughter, Evelyn, and her husband moved into 508 Poole Street, the home her parents made after moving from Mathews more than 50 years earlier. He worked as an automobile salesman, a cleaning and pressing business manager, and a mechanic. Sarah and Judson’s youngest daughter, Lillian, also lived in Norfolk. Her Larchmont address and husband’s career as a certified public accountant would lead one to believe she was better off than her younger sister, yet for unknown reasons, her mother lived at Eastern State. No judgement. Just saying.

Ida died in 1963 at the age of 94, after spending 17 years at Eastern State. Earlier in life, between 1886 and 1901, she and husband Benjamin, a farmer, had three sons and two daughters, four of whom were living when Ida went to “Williamsburg” in 1946. First born Luther lived in Baltimore, Maryland, where he enjoyed a career in the Merchant Marines. Daughter Ethel, 56, lived in Halliford with her husband, a fisherman and chicken farmer, and two children. Daughter Ruth, 51, lived with her family in Norfolk, where her husband was also a Merchant Marine. Joseph, 47, lived near his parents in Mathews and worked for the Colonial National Park in Yorktown. Although Ida had suffered from heart disease for 30 years, her cause of death was listed as wasting disease, a condition of wasting and weakening due to chronic illness.

Two years after Ida’s death, the last of my three paternal great grandaunts, Clemmie Lewis Hunley (1874-1968), entered Eastern State. She also lived a long life and was probably part of the third of Eastern State patients who were aged and not mentally ill. She was the fifth of six children of Robert T. Lewis (1828-1893) and Diannah Marchant (1837-1905) and the only girl. She married Enos Littleberry Hundley in 1896 and their only child, Harold Wainwright Hunley, was born two years later. Harold was another Merchant Marine. He died in the U.S. Marine Hospital in Norfolk of sepsis in 1931. Clemmie lived through many family tragedies. Her father died when she was 19 and Diannah lived with Clemmie and Enos until her death in 1905, when Clemmie was 31. Her brothers died in 1932, 1940, 1954, 1959, and 1964. The last brother died by suicide. Clemmie's husband, Enos, also died in 1964, leaving Clemmie with no immediate family. They had not been well off. In the 1940 U.S. Census, the last to be released (the National Archives releases census records to the general public 72 years after the census date; the 1950 census will be released in April 2022) Enos’s occupation is listed as crabbing. I have no idea who, but someone in my extended family took Clemmie to Eastern State, where she was admitted on June 14, 1965, and lived until she died of a blessed heart attack in 1968, when she was 93.

About that time, entering my teenage years, I began my special attraction to history. When I entered The College of William and Mary in 1973, I was pleased to attend the historic college because I suspected that some of my ancestors had attended the institution. I had no idea of my long family connection to the other institution in town. Eastern State Hospital was by then tucked away on the old Dunbar farm. Due to overcrowding at William and Mary, some of my fellow students lived in off-campus housing, about two miles away, in leased buildings no longer used by Eastern State Hospital. The College named the annex James Blair Terrace and later the Dillard Complex. The JBT bus rounded through William and Mary every few hours when I was a student.