Sent away: Indianapolis, then Logansport, and the Westville traffic

1848 — Beatty closed 1979

The city's committed went to other cities' hospitals, on the county's road: Mishawaka had no commitment road of its own; it used St. Joseph County's, and the road is documented from the statute. Indiana's first state hospital for the insane, enacted in 1827 and built at Indianapolis in 1848, was for forty years the destination of every county's commitments. The General Assembly of 1883 provided three more hospitals and assigned the counties among them by name; the Cass County history's printing of the act lists St. Joseph among the twenty-one counties whose insane the Northern Indiana Hospital at Logansport was to provide for. That hospital opened on 1 July 1888 — Longcliff, in the local name — and took this county's committed residents for the whole of the state-hospital era; it stands open still. A nearer house entered the traffic in the middle of the twentieth century: the Dr. Norman M. Beatty Memorial Hospital at Westville, dedicated 1949, whose civil division admitted from 1951 from seventeen counties of northern Indiana. The county's own paper documents the traffic at its Mishawaka-facing end: the county home's timeline records under 1966 a two-way effort between Portage Manor and Westville — residents pressed toward admission there, Beatty pressing transfers back, and letters about "runaways" from the Manor who had wound up at the hospital — and under 1980, when the Manor's admission rules were relaxed, the classes newly admitted included "'mental patients' from Logansport." Beatty's civil era ended in 1979, when the hospital became the Westville Correctional Center. No count of this county's commitments across the era is published in the sources reached, and no count of Mishawaka's share of them exists in any source reached; none is constructed here. The institutions are Logansport's and Westville's and are told whole in the South Bend file; what is Mishawaka's is the fact of the road itself — that for a century and a half, a resident of this city adjudged insane left the county to be treated, and the city's own ground held no destination to send them to until the present century.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration (IARA), "Other Indiana Hospitals for the Mentally Ill and Developmentally Disabled" — the Indianapolis hospital enacted 1827 and built 1848; Logansport's opening in 1888 and its operation today; and the Beatty record: dedicated 1949, civil division admitting from seventeen northern Indiana counties from 1951, conversion to the Westville Correctional Center in 1979.
2. History of Cass County, Indiana (Helm, 1886), the Northern Indiana Hospital section — the 1883 act's county list naming St. Joseph among the twenty-one counties assigned to Logansport.
3. St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" — the 1966 Westville traffic in both directions and the 1980 admission of "mental patients" from Logansport, as the timeline gives them.
4. South Bend section of this history — the sent-away traffic told whole, at the county's size.