The Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital, 1870-1886

Figure 1. The west elevation and first floor plan of the Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital, as depicted by the author. A contemporary account of the facility described a building that covered an area of sixty-nine by forty feet. Its main building was a story-and-a-half high and thirty-three by forty feet. Two wings flanked the main portion, each two stories high and eighteen by forty feet. Drawing by Laurie J. Bryant; ink by James Gosney. Courtesy of Laurie J. Bryant.

The Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital, 1870–1886: Mental Illness in Early Utah

BY LAURIE J. BRYANT

In the late nineteenth century, psychiatry was gradually beginning to be recognized as a medical discipline in Europe and in the more progressive “insane asylums” in the eastern United States. Derisive terms such as crazy, maniac, insane, madman, and lunatic were in common use to describe and disparage the mentally ill, but they did not appear in Utah newspapers until 1868, when Joseph Sherman, said to be a boot-maker from Canada, had already been jailed for nearly a year in the basement of city hall.

Without offering any details, the Deseret News reported that Sherman had been “arrested as a maniac” in June of 1867 and simply held in jail. When he was brought before Judge Thomas J. Drake on April 14, 1868, Sherman refused to answer any questions, called the judge “a d____d old humbug,” and then tried to escape. Captured and brought back, he was returned to jail. The city attorney, Hosea Stout, stated that Sherman was “not fit to be at large” and petitioned the judge to “have him taken care of.” 1

But what did that mean? There were no laws in Utah Territory regarding civil commitment until 1886, after the large Territorial Asylum opened in Provo, and no record of Sherman’s arrest or trial in any criminal court exists, not even a guardianship established through the probate court. 2 As a perceived risk to public safety, Sherman was returned to his cell. He would not see daylight for another nine years.

In 1867, most people in the United States still lived east of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and in 1870, after more than twenty years of in-migration, even Salt Lake City’s population was no more than eighteen people per square mile. 3 Almost everyone had made the journey west in wagons, buggies, and handcarts. Some of these latecomers were sick, and a few were labeled “insane” or “idiotic.” If they had no family to care for them, there was no place for them except on the streets or perhaps in jail. The 1860 United States Federal Census was the first to include a column to be marked for those who might be “deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper or convict.” Only about twenty people in Utah Territory fell into these categories, and all lived with their families. 4 There were no institutions to care for them and no laws governing their care, as there had been in the eastern United States.

The great breakthrough in travel came when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. A year later, the Utah Central Railroad, promoted by Brigham Young and other leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, linked Salt Lake City to Ogden and thus by rail to both East and West Coasts.

Efficient travel provided many benefits. Immigrants no longer had to spend months on the trail, enduring bad weather, accidents, illness, and exhaustion. For the price of a railroad ticket, sometimes borrowed from the church’s Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company, and a few days’ time, whole families could arrive safely with all their belongings in what the Latter-day Saints called Zion. Commercial goods that had been very costly to haul for over a thousand miles could be shipped quickly and easily, making them cheaper and more abundant. The pioneer era was over.

But along with the welcome trainloads of Mormon pioneers came an influx of itinerant individuals—called wayfarers or strangers—who had no ties to the LDS church or to families who had arrived earlier. Salt Lake City, and for that matter Utah territory, were left to deal with the unanticipated consequences of this influx.

The Deseret News reported on February 3, 1869, that a petition had been sent to the Territorial Legislature, requesting an appropriation for an insane asylum. Joseph Sherman’s fifteen months in the city jail was cited as part of the rationale. 5 In the legislature, the House Special Joint Commission recommended that $10,000 be appropriated, if Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County would “appropriate $20,000, or see that the same is raised from other sources.” 6 Two days later, on February 19, 1869, a line item in the Territorial Assembly’s budget read, “To be drawn by Salt Lake City to assist in erecting an Insane asylum and Hospital, [$]5000.00.” For only half the requested amount, the institution would then be expected to carry out a second major function. 7

An “Asylum and Hospital” would be an answer to a social problem that weakened the safety and economic order of the territory. Whereas the other immigrants felt threatened by Native Americans, wild animals, capricious weather, and food shortages, those who could not contribute to the economy had to be controlled but also cared for, usually by law. This approach had been used since the seventeenth century in Massachusetts, where laws referred to “distracted persons” and “idiots.” 8

Mental hospitals had a long history in the United States by 1869, beginning in 1770 with the opening of what was later called the Virginia Eastern Asylum at Williamsburg. The earliest institutions were simply holding facilities meant to house the mentally ill and those with developmental delays whose families were unable to care for them. But by the early nineteenth century, the expectations for many public and private asylums had changed dramatically. Charities, legislators, and city governments prescribed and built institutions of all kinds—poor houses, reformatories, prisons, and insane asylums—to revive what they fondly recalled as the enviable traditions of the colonial period, and to return all citizens to peaceful and productive lives. At the same time, religious groups such as the Quakers and Shakers, influenced by the period of Protestant religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840), were creating institutions that, while rigid in their concept and practices, nonetheless included what was known as traitement moral. 9 The term in English actually meant “a benevolent approach to care-taking.” Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809–1883) spent his forty-year career at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane attempting to cure patients through the architectural designs of asylums: their windows, corridors, and novel ventilation systems. 10 One approach that was thought to elicit a cure, or at least improvement, remained in favor—a peaceful setting where, removed from visitors, from the noise and distractions of city life, and from all that had been familiar but upsetting, inmates would at least become more tractable.

The east façade of the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases. The grandeur and serenity idealized in this image represented a standard for nineteenth-century asylums. The Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital decidedly did not adhere to this ideal. W. E. Tucker, printer, undated (nineteenth century). Courtesy Library of Congress HABS PA, 51-PHILA, 511—10.

Utah’s first mental institution is generally understood to be the Territorial Insane Asylum, a sprawling building in the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style. It opened in 1885, on the east side of Provo. It was not. In fact, the first asylum was a much less imposing stone and frame structure, only a few miles from the center of Salt Lake City. When the facility opened in 1870, reaching it required a difficult ride uphill, to a spot high on the western slope of the Wasatch Mountains on what was then, and now, known as the East Bench. Its nearest neighbor was a farmhouse more than half a mile to the west.

The original Territorial Insane Asylum at Provo was demolished between 1976 and 1981 and replaced by a group of smaller residential and administration buildings. 11 But the fate of the Asylum and Hospital at Salt Lake City? That is a much more complex question. It is not shown on any known map. There are no known drawings, other than a tiny, indistinct image on a featureless plain. 12 In the 1870s and 1880s, early photographers—Charles R. Savage, Andrew J. Russell, Edward Martin, Charles W. Carter, and many others—made thousands of images of Salt Lake City while the hospital was being built and in use. Yet not one photograph of the building or its surroundings, only four miles from the center of town and virtually on the Mormon Trail, is known to exist. 13 That lack of documentation has caused a great deal of confusion about where the place was and even doubts as to whether it existed at all. Its location, adjacent to the well-traveled route along Emigration Creek, and the prominent references to it in city newspapers, should have left no doubt about its presence.

Fortunately, the Salt Lake Telegraph printed two descriptions of the Asylum and Hospital building, one in the fall of 1869 while construction was underway and the following one in April 1871, about a year after its completion. The facility’s main portion was flanked by two wings, each two stories high. The Telegraph’s reporting on its structure conveyed both a perception of the patients’ behavior and how that behavior would be treated. “The building contains in all seventeen apartments, some with strongly fastened doors and windows, but well-lighted, roomy and comfortable, where occasionally patients have to be kept when they are unusually refractory. Other rooms for dormitories are neat, comfortable and inviting. . . . While looking out on the West from the front side of the building are a couple of apartments for the use of the patients when rational.” 14 (See figure 1.)

Had the designers and builders understood and incorporated the lessons learned by doctors and asylum superintendents from coast to coast during decades of experience? The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), organized in 1844, circulated among its members the developing trends in architecture, particularly the shift from the large Kirkbride-style asylum toward cottage-type housing arranged to simulate a village, along with their practices of moral treatment. 15 But it appears that Salt Lake City’s institution had little in common with either of those widely used forms. What was there about its design that the city felt would be appropriate for someone like Joseph Sherman? Since it was meant to serve as both asylum and hospital, how had it been designed to serve two very different groups with different needs, in a single limited space?

Along with its fences, outbuildings, fields, and nearly all the official records that might have been kept, the Asylum and Hospital is long gone. Its history has been so poorly documented that even people who should have known exactly where it stood seemed only to be guessing. A publication by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers placed it where a Catholic women’s school, St. Mary of the Wasatch, was built in the 1920s, northeast of the school’s stone entrance gates that are still standing near 1300 South and 2640 East streets. 16 Later, Charles McKell, then the director of social service at the state hospital in Provo, offered two possible sites, one at about Twenty-fourth East and Ninth South, and the other, again, near St. Mary of the Wasatch. 17 The actual location, quite plainly given in the 1870 ordinance establishing the Asylum and Hospital, is nearly a mile from either of those suggested locations.

In fact, the Asylum and Hospital was close to streets and places that are well known in Salt Lake City today. It faced 1300 South Street, perhaps 200 yards north of where that crosses Wasatch Boulevard. The land there is still city property, at the south end of the Bonneville Golf Course and slightly west of the tennis courts. A small area of level terrain there is exactly where county property records, and the city ordinance of 1870, placed it. Later records refine its location further, reflecting the whittling down of the boundaries by subsequent buyers and sellers. 18

An even more persuasive clue is the presence of black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia) between the golf course and 1300 South. Some of the first pioneers brought black locust seeds to Utah Territory to act as “early successional plants,” trees that would grow in full sun where few others would, and rapidly. Their thorns and overly abundant blossoms make them unpopular today, but black locusts were specifically named in an early description of the asylum and its grounds. 19 A small tree at the south boundary of the Bonneville Golf Course, and a dense cluster of large trees on a nearby private property, are likely the descendants of the original plantings. 20 Rarely seen in Salt Lake City today, there are no other black locust trees in the surrounding area.

With its approximately 12,000 inhabitants, Salt Lake City was the largest population center in a sparsely settled territory in 1869. It was also the center of newspaper journalism, the principal medium for large-scale information sharing at the time. Events at mental institutions were a popular topic in Utah newspapers and, presumably, with their readers. In the thirty-two years between 1853, when the first such article was printed in the fledgling Deseret News, and 1885, when Utah’s Territorial Insane Asylum opened in Provo, over 1,500 articles, notices, and advertisements about asylums in the United States and worldwide appeared in Utah newspapers. Often the focus was on tragedy—fires and inmate deaths—but it would be false to claim that local residents were ignorant of these institutions. They could even have known about the town of Gheel, Belgium, where for centuries residents accepted the mentally ill to live among them, participating in a community approach that was more quiet inclusion than therapy. 21

At the City Council meeting on August 10, 1869, plans and specifications for the building were presented, along with the understanding that it would be built somewhere on the “Quarantine Grounds,” a large area that extended southeast along the Wasatch foothills from the mouth of Emigration Canyon. Council member Alonzo Raleigh, a mason by trade, was “added to said committee for the special purposes of [the building’s] erection.” Raleigh, who expected to leave on a mission for the LDS church to the East in October, wasted no time. 22 By September 19, the facility was under construction, long before the land had been legally purchased from its owner. In a confusing sequence of transactions, Salt Lake City mayor Daniel H. Wells had paid $209 for the land in December 1869, although the seller, George Peterson, did not actually receive the patent or title from the federal government until November 1871. 23 The building was probably complete before the ordinance identifying it as proposed was passed by the city council on February 8 and printed in the Deseret News on February 23, 1870. 24

On the day the Asylum and Hospital was completed, a distinguished group of city and religious leaders, including Wells, Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and Judge Elias Smith “proceeded in carriages from the City Hall to the Asylum, located about four miles E. S. East from the point of starting, on the bench between Emigration and Parley’s canons, on a very elevated and pleasant site.” A dirt road, described as “rather rough, somewhat crooked, and very dusty” led to an unsteady bridge across Emigration Creek and from there to the asylum’s north gate. The group “assembled, sang a hymn, knelt in prayer, and dedicated the grounds, the building and appurtenances to God, for the purposes for which they were designed.” They did not go inside.

The group then drove “about three-quarters of a mile east to the [new] Quarantine Hospital.” Known as the “Pest House,” it was not so much a hospital as a prison, built with a single purpose—to isolate those with infectious diseases who had no family or friends to care for them—and part of a longstanding practice in the United States and elsewhere. Its spring was another quarter-mile east, and from there most of the men went back to the city. A few returned to the asylum to spend more time observing the building’s exterior, remarking on the trees recently planted around it—all somewhat thinned or killed outright by grasshoppers—and its small expanse of farmland. 25

Because 1870 was a census year, at least a partial list of the first patients’ names exists. The census listed Sarah Meyers, Alice Nuttall, Emma Walveton, and Alice Weiter, and described them as “insane.” 26 With the patients, in the census, was the Peterson family: the steward, George, who had sold this land to the city, his wife Jacobine, and their children. 27 The ordinance establishing the Asylum and Hospital provided clear instructions for record keeping, stating that the steward “shall also keep a book or record of the Asylum and Hospital, entering therein the name, time and place of birth, so far as can be ascertained, date of entrance, date of discharge or death of any inmate.” 28 If Peterson and his successors followed this directive, the records have been lost.

By June 1870, the city had appointed Jeter Clinton as the institution’s physician and Theodore McKean as its superintendent, both of them recognized local men. 29 Clinton’s only apparent qualification for the position was that he had been a druggist. 30 McKean apparently had little direct contact with patients or staff, but he did report to the Territorial Assembly in 1872 that “the building of the City Asylum and Hospital commenced in the fall of 1869 and was erected under the auspices of the City Council of Salt Lake City at a cost of $15,054.89.” 31 The Asylum and Hospital accepted patients not only from the local area but from anywhere in the territory. It functioned as a charity hospital, but as McKean reported, “The expense of keeping the patients has been assumed in some instances by their friends, in others by the several counties where they resided and by the Corporation of Salt Lake City.” 32

With the limited information kept by staff, much of what is known about the patients must be drawn from newspapers and the Salt Lake City Record of the Dead, which reported the place of death simply as “Asylum.” 33 The first patient to die was James Pettit, who was born in Nauvoo, Illinois, and came to Utah as a child in 1850. He had been “kept at the City Asylum . . . for about a year, being subject to fits” (epilepsy) when he died in December 1871. 34 His death was followed by those of Joel Wood, a pioneer of 1866 who died of chronic diarrhea, and John Pouder or Powder, a middle-aged man who died of “inflam. Brain producing Insanity” and was buried in the “Potters field.” 35 Henry Stocks arrived in the Salt Lake Valley from England in 1855. In 1856, Stocks admitted to Brigham Young that he had begun experiencing fits, but he became a member of the 48th Quorum of the Seventies nonetheless. Stocks became progressively more tormented, apparently causing such disruption that his wife Mary refused to live with him. He died in convulsions and was buried in a pauper’s grave in April 1873. 36

The personal tragedies of people such as Powder and Stocks occurred amidst the close and often tense setting of Salt Lake City in the 1870s. Three newspapers shared prominence in the city at that time: the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Herald, and the Salt Lake Tribune. The first was published by the LDS church, the second was owned by church members and reflected the views of the Deseret News, and the third was a virulently anti-Mormon paper owned, at the time, by a Kansas businessman. The papers began a proxy battle over the asylum in 1873, centered on Joseph Sherman. The Herald led off in May 1873, giving a favorable review of the building and grounds “in a healthy and pleasant location. The building is kept clean, the yard for recreation is large, and the keepers humanely disposed.” 37 The Salt Lake Tribune responded in September with “A Terrible Case of Suffering,” raging against the treatment of “J. Sherman,” who was still confined in the “living tomb” of the city jail after more than five years, never allowed to see daylight or any face other than his jailor’s.” “The authorities,” wrote the newspaper, were unwilling to put Sherman in the asylum, “because the building is too fragile to restrain his violence.” 38

Having someone committed to the asylum was quite informal and, again, reflected the circumstances of contemporary Salt Lake City; before 1886, when the territorial legislature passed a suite of laws regarding commitment, treatment, and release, no legal process seems to have existed for commitment. 39 Sometimes the action took place in a city justice or alderman’s court. Perhaps most often, an unruly person like Sherman was simply arrested and sent to the asylum from the jail or prison. Annie White presented such a case. Reportedly, White had shot at her husband and, for some months, had roamed the city in a “demented” state. Then in May 1874, she “threatened to take the life” of a woman raising one of her children, “going to the house with a pistol and knife.” The Salt Lake Herald noted her arrest by the police and that she would “doubtless be sent to the insane asylum.” 40 White was sent to the facility and, four years later, played a very sad part in its history.

The experience of Susan Vance presented a similar situation, but one complicated by race. As a Native woman who lived a public life in a downtown slum, Vance received no respect from the press, which reported somewhat frequently about her run-ins with the city authorities. One of those authorities was—problematically— Jeter Clinton. 41 Clinton had many roles in Salt Lake City including city alderman, justice of the peace, quarantine physician, and physician at the Asylum and Hospital. 42

In December 1873, Vance fired a six-shooter in her Commercial Street dwelling, prompting the police to jail her. When she appeared in court, it was before Clinton, who let her off with a small fine and “an admonition . . . that if she was brought before him again on a similar charge he would recommend that she be taken to the lunatic asylum.” 43 Clinton’s multiple positions in city government apparently allowed him to pass judgment on individuals he saw in police court—essentially sending himself patients; acting as their caretaker; and, perhaps, being paid by the city for both roles. The following April of 1874, the Deseret News briefly mentioned Vance’s commitment to the institution, where she resided throughout the summer and which released her for showing improvement; by that October, police officers had picked Vance up again and returned her to the asylum. 44 Thus, people like Annie White and Susan Vance, seen as troublesome by at least some of their fellow citizens, could be quite casually committed to the asylum, at times by a man who had a conflict of interest, to say the least.

Seymour B. Young. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 14325.

Jeter Clinton resigned his city positions around August 1874, including as asylum physician, and moved on to operating his resort at Lake Point. 45 His replacement was Seymour Bicknell Young, a nephew of Brigham Young. Sent to New York for medical training, Seymour Young returned to Utah in 1874 and stepped into the asylum position, while also maintaining a private medical practice and holding important positions in the LDS church. 46 Young made an offer to buy the facility from the city in 1876, and failing that, leased it for twenty dollars a month. 47 In his diary, Young reported visiting the asylum on April 30, 1876. 48 A few days later, he attended to Sam Rogers, a worker at the city jail, who had been stabbed in the chest with a knife attached to a broomstick. 49 Joseph Sherman, still waiting to be moved to the hospital, had made the weapon and used it. After ten years in the city jail, Sherman was finally moved to the Asylum and Hospital in July 1877, where he would be kept in a cage in the building’s yard for another eight years. 50

In the early nineteenth century, removing the patients from family and friends, from business and other cares, had been thought the first and most important element of a cure. Visitors were prohibited. Although the early asylums had only limited success in returning patients to anything like a productive or even a peaceful life and although asylum conditions generally devolved throughout the United States with the passage of time, some did operate with that humanitarian purpose in mind. 51 Things were different at the Asylum and Hospital, where visitors, including newspaper reporters, were common. There was even a visitor register in Dr. Young’s office, indicating that the earlier prohibition had not only been abandoned but refuted. Men’s and women’s rooms were no longer in separate areas but directly adjacent. In the fifteen rooms there were nineteen patients, some admittedly sick rather than insane, some hobbled or caged. 52

At least twenty-one asylum patients died between 1873 and 1878, among them Louis Bertrand, the first French convert to the LDS church, who had translated the Book of Mormon. 53 The details of some of these deaths make it clear that the asylum had taken on many types of patients, including the infirm, community outsiders who were sick, and the elderly. George Straus, a German noted as a stranger in the city’s death record, died in the fall of 1873 of consumption and was buried in an unmarked grave. William Pugh, meanwhile, had all the toes on his right foot amputated after they were frozen; it is likely that a post-surgery infection killed him in April 1874. And Elizabeth Savagar Cole, who had given birth on a ship leaving from Liverpool and crossed the plains in 1853, died twenty years later at the institution of “General Debility.” 54

Of the eight deaths in 1878 alone, those of Annie White and Mercy Hodgson Robinson provoked outrage and an investigation by a grand jury. Since about 1867, Robinson had lived in a small adobe house shaded by the city wall, which ran along what is now Fourth Avenue, near where it crossed City Creek. The house is still there, at 177 C Street. 55 By the winter of 1878, however, she lived at the asylum, sharing a partitioned room with White. Both women died in a fire in the early morning hours of December 9, 1878, that engulfed their two rooms and dropped flaming embers into the one below. The institution had been full of visitors that day and what supervision might have been given by the steward, George Peterson, proved inadequate. White burned to death, her body “literally charred.” Robinson probably suffocated. The Deseret News speculated that the fire started when a visitor dropped a match, “or that a match was given to her by some one.” A coroner’s inquest, held before George Taylor, exonerated both Seymour Young and George Peterson from the blame of the deaths—but it also insisted that visitors receive written permits from the physician. 56

Those findings must not have satisfied the larger community. The Third District Court of Utah Territory impaneled a grand jury in February 1879 to look into the asylum, among other matters; its findings were published by the local press in April. 57 While the language of the grand jury report was restrained, its conclusions were damning. The details it revealed—that there were hospital patients among the insane, that the physician made only occasional visits, that the building and grounds, like the plan of management, were inadequate, and that the “contract system upon which it is conducted is open to objection as exposing helpless creatures to the cupidity of private interest”—exposed the deep flaws in Young’s management, supported by public funding. 58 Even the Deseret News printed the report, verbatim. 59 For his part, Young never mentioned the fire, the patient deaths, or the grand jury’s reports in his diary.

After leasing the asylum from the city for more than three years, Young made an offer to buy it outright in November 1879 for five thousand dollars. The city council consented, with the provision that Young would care for Sarah Meyers at no additional cost. He made the first payment of one thousand dollars, the rest to be paid quarterly at 10 percent interest. 60 This occurred despite another grand jury report, published in the local press a few days later, which described Young’s institution as inadequate and even inhumane. 61

Deaths at the Asylum and Hospital continued. As the years passed and the oldest patients aged, at least eighteen of them died there. Even members of prominent families, whose names are recognizable to any Utah historian, were sent there as developmentally delayed or “idiotic” persons. Jacob Reese Kimball, the son of Heber C. and Ruth Reese Kimball, lived as a child and teen with his family. The first cryptic mention of his residence at the asylum was an 1875 notice asking that citizens watch for “a demented young man . . . who answers to the name of Jacob.” He died at the asylum about a month later, with no cause of death provided, and was buried in the Kimball-Whitney family cemetery. 62 John M. Bernhisel, meanwhile, was a well-known and highly placed physician and political figure. The 1880 census identified Bernhisel’s son William and daughter Cora both as “idiotic.” William was sent to the asylum, where he died of “softening of brain,” while Cora remained at home for many years and later lived in the Salt Lake County Infirmary and Hospital. When Cora died in 1940, she had been institutionalized for thirty years. Both are buried near their father in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. 63 Unlike Kimball and the Bernhisels, most of the deceased were without family or friends in the territory, some of them known by a first name or surname alone.

Amidst the struggles and inadequacies of the Asylum and Hospital, some local voices began to call for the creation of a larger public institution. Without preamble, the Salt Lake Herald reported a brief statement Daniel Wells made before the legislature in early February 1880. He presented a resolution for a committee to look into the need for establishing a territorial asylum and hospital, “and for sanitary purposes generally, which was adopted.” The Territorial Legislature agreed and appointed a committee. Elsewhere in that day’s edition, the Herald editorialized that the lack of a publicly funded asylum in the territory “certainly reflects otherwise than creditable. . . . Humanity demands that a place for the afflicted be provided.” 64 Wells then shepherded the resolution through the Territorial Legislature, with several readings and amendments, resulting in its passage. 65 Wells had been the mayor of Salt Lake City from 1866 until 1876, but by 1880 his principal role in government was as a member of the Council in the Legislative Assembly. In that office, he might have felt an obligation to enlarge the territory’s role in providing and funding an asylum for all its residents. Bills from the asylum, submitted to the City Council, had averaged more than five hundred dollars per month for years, even when few patients were confined there. The Legislative Assembly had often supplemented those appropriations as more patients were admitted from counties outside Salt Lake. 66

Once the push for a territorial asylum began, it simply accelerated. By March 1880, a board of directors for the future hospital had been established. 67 Within a few months, the board had chosen four counties where the new asylum might be located. 68 Salt Lake County was quickly ruled out as a possible site, in spite of support from the Salt Lake Herald, following the objections of at least one man, who wrote to the Herald that he and others “would always vote against Salt Lake County as long as there was a chance of it being erected” on “the grounds owned by Dr. Young.” 69 Finally, the commission selected a site just east of Provo for what would become the Utah Territorial Insane Asylum. 70

Without a word to his diary, Young sold the old asylum and its eighty acres of land back to the Salt Lake City Corporation in May 1882 for one thousand dollars, one-fifth of what he had paid for it. 71 Even so, he still listed that land as part of his assets in his diary at year’s end. 72 Not so much as a notice appeared in the local newspapers, and there was no discussion of such a transaction in city council minutes. Dr. Young might simply have seen the whirlwind coming and chose to get out of its way.

The whirlwind was not far away. With the knowledge and permission of Governor Eli H. Murray, the Asylum and Hospital received a visit from Dr. George A. Tucker in August 1882. Tucker was an Australian physician and asylum manager on a tour of such institutions in England and the United States. Tucker’s inspection of the facility on August 22, 1882, and his report issued the following day, prompted a flurry of articles in the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News. Both newspapers again printed their long-held and opposing views, the Tribune first pointing out that Tucker was there at the request of the governor. On the following day, having seen Tucker’s report, the Deseret News hastened to reject all of Tucker’s findings, sending its own reporter to collect a more flattering set of data. The Tribune, for its part, printed Tucker’s full report, followed by an article questioning how the asylum could be described as private when it had from the beginning been supported by such large appropriations from the city, the territory, and other counties. 73

Tucker’s report was more detailed and strongly worded than anything the Tribune had published on the institution. The Tribune even suggested in a subtitle that “The Penitentiary the Place for Dr. Seymour B. Young.” Tucker described the building as “a mere cottage” with broken windows surrounded by unkempt grounds. The nine female patients were kept in the “attic or roof” (it was, after all, only a one-and-a-half story building). The mattresses were filled with straw and “the bed clothing [was] disgustingly dirty.” Also on that floor was a barred room where a woman suffering from syphilis lay on the floor. In another room on the upper floor was “a violent man, who had during the past week destroyed his bedstead and utensils, the broken furniture still remaining in the room.” When Tucker visited, the man was in the yard with irons on his hands and feet.

On the ground floor, also in a cage, there was a man who spoke rationally to the visitors and told them he had only been outside once in the past sixty days because he objected to having irons on his arms and legs. Tucker continued, reporting that the chamber pots had not been emptied and the stench in the asylum was terrible. Outdoors there were four cages in a lean-to. In one of them was a single man “of fine proportions, clean and tidy in appearance, who had been there confined for seven years,” admittedly in the “cleanest and neatest part of the entire institution.” That would have been Joseph Sherman.

The steward, Richard McAllister, reported that Dr. Young visited only occasionally and, perhaps most tellingly, that there were no written records of any kind. McAllister also admitted that he sometimes beat the inmates with a cane and that they were admitted and released with nothing more than a “certificate issued by a county Probate Judge.” 74 Tucker’s report simply cemented a decision that was already a fait accompli: construction and contracting for the new asylum at Provo was proceeding apace. 75 The Deseret Weekly News had reported in May that “the south wing of the large insane asylum building at Provo is 15 feet above its foundation.” 76

The failure and loss of the Asylum and Hospital was not Seymour Young’s only challenge in the 1880s. In 1867, Young had married Ann Elizabeth Riter, whom he called Lizzie. He wrote fondly of Lizzie and their children in his diary, and of taking them with him on his occasional visits to the asylum. Then in 1884 Young married a plural wife, Abbie Corilla Wells. Lizzie seems to have known nothing about this second wife until sometime in May 1884, when jealousy between his wives erupted. 77 And that was only the trouble within the family. The worst would come in 1886, when federal marshals pursued Young, attempting to arrest him for polygamy under the 1882 Edmunds Act. He escaped through an upstairs window of his home via a ladder and ran, and the case was eventually dropped for lack of evidence. 78

Enough of the Territorial Asylum in Provo had been completed by the end of July 1885 that many of the patients were moved from Young’s hospital for what was hoped would be improved treatment. On July 31, 1885, the Salt Lake Democrat reported that a large crowd had gathered at the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway passenger depot near 600 West and 200 South streets. They had come to see “about twenty crazy men and women” en route to the new institution in Provo. In keeping with the style of the era, the Democrat described those twenty individuals in language that both pitied and grossly pathologized them. The newspaper described how “Sheriff Groesbeck, Alex. Burt and several keepers” accompanied the patients, who “rode through the city shackeled [sic] to the wagon seats. Some of them seemed conscious of going on a trip, and were delighted, slapping their hands, singing and expressing the happiness of children. . . . They were all put in a special car and hand-cuffed.” The Democrat focused its reporting on “the most central figure of the old troupe,” Joseph Sherman,

A postcard depicting the Utah State Hospital in Provo, circa early twentieth centur‘y. A number of patients from the Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital were transferred to the care of the Provo institution in 1885. Published by Souvenir Novelty Co. Utah State Historical Society, MSS C 376.

So long confined in the city prison. Sherman has been in close confinement for at least twenty years, and being a man of extraordinary strength, very few have dared to face him. . . . To-day he looked like a chained lion, as he sat heavily shackled to the seat by his ankles and wrists. Heretofore, in moving him, a strong cage has been used, made of 4x4 scantling, bolted together with heavy iron bars, in which Sherman would be driven and locked up like a ferocious beast. 79

Many in that crowd at the Rio Grande depot would have been there to see the unfortunates from the Salt Lake City asylum. Perhaps they had followed the years of newspaper reports proclaiming the early success and later the decline of what might have been a humane and curative setting. Perhaps the onlookers were simply relieved that such people had been removed from their community or were convinced that the inmates deserved no better. What the crowd might not have known—unless they were readers of the Salt Lake Tribune— was that not just the mentally ill but also the demented elderly and the developmentally delayed had endured their confinement in a prison-like setting where they might be caged, handcuffed, locked in filthy rooms, and given only two meals a day. Some of their family names—Kimball, Bernhisel—and some of their histories, had the onlookers known about them, would have shocked all but the most unfeeling.

The Salt Lake Democrat held out hope for the new hospital, writing, “At their new, elegant quarters they will receive so much better accommodations that those who are now suffering from the milder forms of mental disorders will have a better chance of being restored to a proper use of their faculties. From a knowledge of the institution, every reason leads to the belief that the patients entering that public asylum will receive the very best of treatment from the superintendent physician and attendants.” 80

The old Asylum and Hospital building stood until at least 1891. It was said to have been “consumed by fire,” but no newspaper reported such an event. It might instead have been scavenged for building materials or collapsed under its own weight. 81 Nothing remains of it at this date. In December 1885, only five months after the patients from Salt Lake City had arrived at the Territorial Asylum, a reporter from the Salt Lake Herald paid them a visit. He wrote that Joseph Sherman, “while in the Salt Lake Asylum, considered such a dangerous case, but who is now out with the others. On many subjects he is quite sane, and is one of the best patients.” 82 When he died of influenza at the state hospital in 1901 at about age seventy-five, Joseph Sherman was hailed as “a model patient” who “did considerable work for the institution as a tailor and shoe-maker. He was a handsome and distinguished looking man and always scrupulously neat in his habits and attire . . . taking great pride in his appearance.” 83

Appendix. Deaths at the Salt Lake Asylum and Burials in the Salt Lake City Cemetery

Notes indicate (where possible) the name of the deceased, death date, additional information, attending physician, and burial place within the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Compiled from Salt Lake County Archives, Death Record Search, slco.org/archives/vital-records/Death .aspx; Utah Division of State History, Utah Cemetery Database, utahdcc.secure.force.com /burials/; and other sources.

John Powder (or Pouder). June 1872. Death Record: “buried from Asylum, 1872, inflam. brain, Insanity.” Potter’s field (B-4-Pauper-456).

Jack Woods. September 1, 1872. No cemetery record. Death Record: buried “x City.”

Henry Hampton. June 19, 1873. Strangulation (hanged himself ). From Isle of Man. Buried UK 2633. Salt Lake Tribune, June 21, 1873.

Johannes (or Johanna) A. Christensen. November 21, 1873. Fits. Plot E. Death Record: person no. 6063, p. 152.

Wallace McIntyre. March 26, 1874. No cause. Plat C? Cemetery Database: UK2878.

William Pugh. April 21, 1874. No cause. Death Record: Plot H 5. Cemetery Database: UK2903.

Joseph Livsey. September 4, 1874. Effects of light, sunstroke. S. B. Young. H-5-16-2E.

Louis A. Bertrand. March 21, 1875. Brain disease. S. B. Young. E-16-9–1E. Harrison Stewart. April 1875. Death Record: buried Plot E. UK 3173.

Jacob R. Kimball. May 31, 1875. No cause. S. B. Young. Heber C. Kimball family plot. Deseret News, June 9, 1875.

Joseph Sherman. April 19, 1876. Lead poisoning, producing insanity. S. B. Young. UNK 3463.

Minnie Plume. May 17, 1876. Apoplexy. S. B. Young. Buried I-11–11–5W. “City Council,” Salt Lake Herald, July 12, 1876.

William Alfred Parks. March 12, 1878. Paralysis. S. B. Young, Plot C. Cemetery Database: K-13-7-1E.

Isaac Blizzard. April 19, 1879. “Insane patient from Tooele”; eighty-three years old. K-13-6-3 E (?). Death Record: Tier No. 3.

Annie White. December 9, 1878. Burned to death. S/2 block 13, 14W? Sch. No. 3 in Death Record. K-13-14-3W. Mercy Robinson. December 9, 1878. Smoke inhalation. J- 15-11-2W.

L. V. (or S. V.) Winaus. July 15, 1879. Scrofula. Age thirtynine. S. B. Young. Death Record: L-11-4. Strangers. L-11- 4-4W.

William Louis Goedert. December 23, 1879. Syphilis. From Germany. S. B. Young. Potter’s field. I-12-3-2W.

Ephraim Luce. March 2, 1880. Old age. Born September 1799, Maine. Arrived with James Cummings Company, 1851. S. B. Young. His children probably bought plot K- 13-13-3E.

Z. Anderson. May 30, 1880. Gangrene. From Finland; probably forty-nine years old. Potter’s field. I-12-4-4W.

Samuel Button. November 19, 1880. Paralysis. Born in Ohio. Brought from near Panguitch and thought to be fortyone. S. B. Young. Strangers. I-12-5-3W. See also 1880 Census.

Name unknown, “related to Swedishman,” Death Record. June 20, 1881. Brain disease, lead poisoning. Dr. Benedict. Strangers, L12-6-2E.

James Caddigan. June 28, 1881 Meningitis. About fifteen years old. S. B. Young. Cemetery Database: K-11-2-4W.

Joseph Davenport. July 4, 1881. Inflamed stomach. About thirty-two. S. B. Young. I-12-6-3E.

Louis Kimball. July 23, 1881. No cause. Perhaps forty; from Massachusetts. S. B. Young. L-12-6-2W.

Margaret Mantell August 2, 1881. No cause. From Switzerland; forty-one years old. S. B. Young. K-12-3-4W.

Mary Dale. August 9, 1881. Old age. Born in England; eightytwo years old. S. B. Young. K-12-4-3E.

Charles Davis. November 20, 1881. Heart disease. S. B. Young. Buried (?) I 13, Strangers. Cemetery Database: I-12-6-4W

William Barnes. October 2, 1882. Erysipelas. Forty-two. S. B. Young. UK 4852.

Samuel Vincent. October 23, 1883. Apoplexy. S. B. Young. Strangers. UK 4880.

Nancy Harmon. July 29, 1883. Old age. Eighty-two. S. B. Young. F-11–11–3W.

Nathan Thayer. November 2, 1883. Paralysis. S. B. Young. Potter’s field. B-4-pauper-133

William G. Young, December 26, 1883. Spotted fever. From Scotland; twenty-nine. Parents in Sevier County. S. B. Young. UK 5263.

Johannah M. Peterson. July 24, 1884. General paralysis. Wife of Peter; born 1826 in Denmark. S. B. Young. UK 5162.

Charles Ashbough. September 16, 1884. Softening of brain. Twenty-six? S. B. Young. Potter’s field. Cemetery Database: B-4-pauper_48.

Henry Allsworth. September 22, 1884. No cause. Born in 1825, England. S. B. Young. M-4-10-3-.

William Henry Bernhisel. October 22, 1884. Softening of brain. Son of John M. Bernhisel and Elizabeth Barker. Born 1849. S. B. Young. B-15-10-5W.

Bernhard McMann. November 1, 1884. Paralysis. Sixty years old. S. B. Young. B-4-Pauper-409.

John Gange. July 18, 1885. Born in England, 1843. S. B. Young. Buried SK, SW xxd Church. Cemetery Database: UK 5656.

Mrs. Hanni. September 8, 1885. General debility. Born in France. S. B. Young. UK 5696.

Hannah Marsh. November 4, 1886. Softening of brain, insanity. S. B. Young. Death Record: S 1/2 xxx. Cemetery Database: UK 6043. This was after the asylum officially closed, but it appears that Young kept a patient or two after that date.

Notes

Much of the credit for this research must go to my colleagues W. Randall Dixon, Thomas Carter, the staff of the Utah Division of State History Research Center, the Utah State Archives and Records Service, and the very patient editors of the Utah Historical Quarterly. The Salt Lake Monument Company matched a grant I received from the State of Utah to create a monument in 2019 to patients who died at the Asylum and Hospital. I am most grateful to the staff of the Salt Lake City Cemetery, and particularly to the late Mark Smith, its sexton. My son Duncan was the inspiration for this work. 1. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret Evening News, April 14, 1868. Judge Thomas J. Drake had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln and was strongly opposed to the Latter-day Saints. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Utah, 1540–1886 (San Francisco, 1889), 610–611.

2. District Court (Third District) Territorial Minute Books, reel 1, box 1, vol. A (1858–1869), Series 1649; Salt Lake County Probate Record Books, Series 3372, both in Utah State Archives and Records Service, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USARS).

3. Francis A. Walker, Map Showing, in Five Degrees of Density, the Distribution, within the Territory of the United States, of the Constitutional Population . . . 1870 (US Census Bureau, 1870), accessed November 10, 2021, census. gov/history/pdf/1870_Population_Density.pdf.

4. 1860 United States Federal Census, Utah Territory.

5. “Items,” Deseret News, February 3, 1869, 413.

6. “Legislative,” Deseret News, February 17, 1869.

7. Territorial Legislative Records, 1851–1894, p. 4555, Series 3150, USARS.

8. Gerald N. Grob, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York: Free Press, 1973), 8.

9. Grob, Mental Institutions, 42.

10. Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 24

11. Janina Chilton, “Reflections: A Photographic Essay of the Utah State Hospital,” Utah Historical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2010): 152.

12. Eli Glover, Bird’s-Eye View of Salt Lake City from the North Looking South-east, Utah (Cincinnati: Strobridge, 1875), map.

13. Ronald L. Fox, personal communication with Laurie J. Bryant, 2017; W. Randall Dixon, “From Emigration Canyon to City Creek: Pioneer Trail and Campsites in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847,” Utah Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1997): 157.

14. “Asylum for the Insane,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph, April 27, 1871.

15. Grob, Mental Institutions, 332.

16. Frances W. Kirkham and Harold Lundstrom, Tales of a Triumphant People: A History of Salt Lake County, Utah (Salt Lake City: International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1947), 10:221; Alan Barnett and Shipler family, Seeing Salt Lake City: The Legacy of the Shipler Photographers (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000), 135.

17. Charles R. McKell, “The Utah State Hospital: A Study in the Care of the Mentally Ill,” Utah Historical Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1955): 297, 303.

18. Title abstracts, N 1/2 SE 1/4, Section 10, T1S, R1E, Book A-3 p. 241, Book A-9 p. 50, Book B-3 p. 241, Salt Lake County Recorder, slco.org/recorder/.

19. “Asylum for the Insane,” Salt Lake Herald, April 27, 1871.

20. Other black locust trees were planted in the Fort Douglas Cemetery in 1864.

21. “Gheel—the City of the Simple,” Deseret News, July 14, 1869.

22. Alonzo H. Raleigh, Diary, (redacted), October 4, 1869, 129–30, 6172, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL).

23. Title abstracts, Salt Lake County Recorder.

24. “An Ordinance, entitled, An Ordinance to establish a City Insane Asylum and Hospital was again introduced. The ordinance was read and taken up for second reading by sections. Several Sections were amended. The Ordinance was read three times. On motion of Councilman Davis [?] the Bill passed its third reading by a vote and became a law. On motion of H. Grow the Council adjourned.” City Council Minutes, February 12, 1870, p. 447, Salt Lake City (Utah), City Recorder Minutes, Series 82755, USARS; see also, “An Ordinance,” Deseret Evening News, February 17, 1870, 2.

25. “Correspondence,” Deseret News, July 6, 1870. For instances of pest houses, see Linda T. Austin, “Escape from the Asylum: The End of Local Care of the Mentally Ill in Memphis and Shelby County,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2013): 62; James Colgrove, “Immunity for the People: The Challenge of Achieving High Vaccine Coverage in American History,” Public Health Reports (1974-) 122, no. 2 (2007): 249; Wendy E. Parmet, “J. S. Mill and the American Law of Quarantine,” Public Health Ethics 1, no. 3 (2008): 213.

26. None of these women is included in the Pioneer Database, which lists members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who traveled overland to Utah Territory before completion of the transcontinental railroad, suggesting that they were, perhaps, “strangers.” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Pioneer Database, 1847–1868, accessed November 11, 2021, history.churchofjesuschrist.org/overlandtravel/.

27. 1870 United States Federal Census, Sugar House Ward, Salt Lake, Utah Territory, roll M593_1611, page 532A, digital image, accessed October 28, 2021, ancestry.com.

28. “An Ordinance,” Deseret News, February 23, 1870, 7.

29. “Official Directory,” Salt Lake Herald, June 8, 1870.

30. For Jeter Clinton’s many roles, including his work as a druggist, see George Owens, Salt Lake City Directory: Including a Business Directory of Provo, Springville, and Ogden, Utah Territory, 1867 ([Salt Lake City]: G. Owens, 1867), 41, 108, 120, 121, 122.

31. Utah Territorial Assembly, House Minutes, February 1–2, 1872, box 11, fd. 15, 00047 ff, item 2919, CHL.

32. “Insane,” Salt Lake Herald, April 21, 1880; “A Loose Danger,” Salt Lake Herald, April 21, 1882.

33. Salt Lake City, City Recorder Death and Burial Register, 1848–1933, Series 21866, USARS. Prior to 1872, this term referred only to the city Asylum and Hospital. Later, the name of the attending physician indicates whether a person died at the Asylum and Hospital or another place.

34. Pioneer Database, s.v., “James Richard Pettit,” accessed November 11, 2021; “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, December 6, 1871, 1.

35. Salt Lake County Archives, Death Record Search, s.v., “Joel Wood,” person no. 5316, p. 133, and “John Powder,” person no. 5162, p. 130, both accessed November 2, 2021, slco.org/archives/vital-records/Death.aspx. (qtns); see also Utah Cemetery Inventory, 1847–2000, and Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., Cemetery Records, 1848– 1992, both s.v. “John Powder,” accessed November 2, 2021, ancestry.com.

36. Henry Stocks, Diary, 1844–1870, MS 9516, CHL; Death Record Search, s.v. “Henry Stock,” person no. 5707, p. 143; 1870 United States Federal Census, Willow Creek Ward, Salt Lake, Utah Territory, roll M593_1611, page 546B, Henry Starks, accessed November 11, 2021, ancestry .com.

37. “The East ‘Bench,’” Salt Lake Herald, May 2, 1873.

38. “A Terrible Case of Suffering,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 16, 1873.

39. Legislature, Utah Code Annotated, 1888, vol. 1:693–713, Series 83238, USARS. No records held by the state archives refer to a legal process prior to 1888.

40. “Insane Woman,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, May 29, 1874.

41. “Court Proceedings,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, September 3, 1873; “On the War Path,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, December 12, 1873.

42. See, for instance, “Official Directory,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 11, 1872, September 6, 1873, April 25, 1874.

43. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, December 17, 1873, 8 (qtn). For more on Jeter Clinton’s checkered career, see “To the Public, and Especially the Mormon Portion of It,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 16, 1872; Andrew Jenson, The Historical Record, A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Historical, Biographical, Chronological and Statistical Matters (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson) 5:320.

44. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, April 8, 1874; “Insane Asylum Candidates,” Salt Lake Herald, October 24, 1874; Ogden Semi-Weekly Junction, October 24, 1874, 3.

45. “Out of Office,” Salt Lake Herald, August 1, 1874.

46. “Official Directory,” Salt Lake Herald, August 28, 1874; “Special Business Notices,” Deseret Evening News, June 23, 1876, 3.

47. Seymour B. Young, Diary, 1865–1885, March 22, 1876, November 19, 1879, p. 22, 114, MSS A 1755 Vault, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah.

48. Young, Diary, 34.

49. Young, Diary, May 7, 1876, 35–36; “A Maniac Stab,” Salt Lake Herald, May 9, 1876.

50. “Joe Sherman,” Salt Lake Herald, July 4, 1877.

51. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (New York: Little, Brown, 1971), 127.

52. “The Asylum,” Salt Lake Herald, June 28, 1877.

53. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, March 24, 1875.

54. Death Record Search, s.v. “George Straus,” person no. 5970, p. 150, “Pugh,” person no. 6266, p. 157, and “Elizabeth Coal,” person no. 5870, p. 147 (qtn.), all accessed November 1, 2021; “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, April 22, 29, 1874; Pioneer Database, s.v. “Elizabeth Cole,” accessed November 1, 2021. For other representative deaths, see Death Record Search, s.v. “Joseph Livsey,” person no. 6498, p. 163, and “Harrison Stewart,” person no. 6762, p. 170; “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, April 28, 1875.

55. Laurie J. Bryant, A Modest Homestead: Life in Small Adobe Homes in Salt Lake City, 1850–1897 (University of Utah Press, 2017), 189–91.

56. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, December 18, 1878, 1 (qtns.); “Fatal Fire,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, December 10, 1878, 3.

57. “Grand Jury Work,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 10, 1879; “The Late Grand Jury Addresses the People,” Deseret Evening News, April 10, 1879; “It Might Have Been,” Salt Lake Herald, April 10, 1879.

58. “It Might Have Been,” Salt Lake Herald, April 10, 1879. The jury foreman was a mining manager named M. T. Burgess, almost certainly not a Latter-day Saint.

59. “The Late Grand Jury Address the People,” Deseret News, April 23, 1879.

60. Young, Diary, November 19, 1879, p. 114; “City Council,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, November 12, 1879, 3.

61. “Grand Jury Report,” Deseret Evening News, November 28, 1879; “Grand Jury Report,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, November 27, 1879; “The Asylum,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, November 30, 1879.

62. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret News, April 21, 1875 (qtn.); 1860 United States Federal Census, Great Salt Lake City Ward 18, Great Salt Lake, Utah Territory, page 270, Jacob Kimball; 1870 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City Ward 18, Salt Lake, Utah Territory, roll M593_1611, page 700A; Jacob Kimball; “Died,” Deseret News, June 9, 1875; Death Record Search, person no. 6820, p. 171; Utah, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1800–1985, s.v. “Jacob R Kimball,” Utah, Salt Lake County, Third District Court Probate Case Files, accessed November 9, 2021, ancestry.com, suggests this was a case of guardianship.

63. 1880 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, roll 1337, page 123B, enumeration district 047, William Bernhisel and Cora L. Bernhisel (first qtn.); Death Record Search, s.v. “Wm Henry Bernhisel,” person no. 12354, p. 309 (second qtn.), and s.v. “Cora Bernhisel,” State of Utah Death Certificate, May 8, 1940; “Obituaries,” Salt Lake Telegram, May 11, 1940.

64. “The Legislature,” “Chips” (first qtn.), and “Insane Asylum” (second qtn.), Salt Lake Herald, February 7, 1880.

65. “The Legislature,” Salt Lake Herald, February 21, 1880, 3.

66. “Legislative Assembly,” Deseret News, February 23, 1876.

67. “Territorial Insane Asylum,” Salt Lake Herald, March 3, 1880.

68. “Territorial Insane Asylum,” Salt Lake Herald, April 9, 1880.

69. “Asylum Commissioners,” Salt Lake Herald, April 28, 1880; “The Asylum,” Salt Lake Herald, June 27, 1880.

70. “The Insane Asylum,” Salt Lake Herald, August 6, 1881.

71. Title abstracts, Book A-3 p. 241, Book A-9 p. 50, Book B-3 p. 241, Salt Lake County Recorder.

72. Young, Diary, December 18, 1882, p. 169.

73. “Investigating Our Asylums,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 22, 1882; “Hell in Utah” and “The Insane Asylum,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 23, 1882; “The Asylum Again,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 24, 1882; Deseret News, August 22, 1882, 3; “Dr. Young’s Insane Asylum,” Deseret Evening News, August 23, 1882. See George A. Tucker, Lunacy in Many Lands (Sydney: Charles Potter, 1887), 549–50, for what appears to be the same report on the institution.

74. “Hell in Utah,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 23, 1882. Throughout the research involved in this work, I was unable to find any kind of asylum records concerning patient admissions, releases, or deaths. In the diary of Seymour B. Young, the only exception was the death of and inquest concerning William Graham Young in 1883–1884. Salt Lake City and County each maintained a Record of the Dead, from which I obtained the information here.

75. “Local and Other Matters,” Ogden Herald, August 28, 1882.

76. “Local and Other Matters,” Deseret Weekly News, May 24, 1882.

77. Young, Diary, May 24, 28, 29, 1884, p. 227–29.

78. “Dr. Young’s Escape,” Salt Lake Democrat, June 16, 1886; “No Evidence,” Ogden Herald, August 3, 1887.

79. “Unfortunate Humans,” Salt Lake Democrat, July 31, 1885, 4.

80. “Unfortunate Humans,” Salt Lake Democrat, July 31, 1885.

81. “Real Estate and Business Notes,” Salt Lake Herald- Republican, January 25, 1891; Frances W. Kirkham and Harold Lundstrom, Tales of a Triumphant People: A History of Salt Lake County, Utah (Salt Lake City: International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1947), 10:221.

82. “The Territory’s Wards,” Salt Lake Herald, December 17, 1885.

83. “Provo,” March 23, 1901 (qtns.); “Local Briefs,” Deseret Evening News, March 21, 1901.