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

1848 — Beatty closed 1979

The county's committed went to other cities' hospitals: The state hospital era opened at Indianapolis: Indiana's first state hospital for the insane was enacted as early as 1827 but not built until 1848, and for forty years it was the destination of every county's commitments, this one among them. The General Assembly of 1883 provided for three more hospitals — at Evansville, Richmond, and Logansport — and assigned the counties among them by name. The Cass County history's printing of the act lists the insane of twenty-one counties to be provided for at the Northern Indiana Hospital at Logansport: Cass, DeKalb, Elkhart, Fulton, Huntington, Jasper, Kosciusko, Lake, LaPorte, Lagrange, Miami, Marshall, Newton, Noble, Porter, Pulaski, Steuben, St. Joseph, Starke, White, Whitley, and Wabash. The hospital opened on 1 July 1888 on a bluff above the Wabash — Longcliff, in the local name — receiving 309 patients under its first superintendent, Dr. Joseph G. Rogers; in 1927 it was renamed Logansport State Hospital.

It is Logansport's institution, printed here at the size of this county's use of it: it took St. Joseph County's committed residents for the whole of the state-hospital era, and it stands open still, serving primarily the counties of northern and west-central Indiana, with 38,498 admissions counted by the State Archives as of June 2008. A second, nearer state hospital entered the traffic in the middle of the twentieth century: the Dr. Norman M. Beatty Memorial Hospital at Westville, in LaPorte County, dedicated in 1949, whose civil division began admitting patients in 1951 from seventeen counties of northern Indiana. Beatty is Westville's, and it enters this record on the county's own paper: the St. Joseph County Home's timeline records, under 1966, a two-way effort then running between Portage Manor and Westville — "a flurry of activity trying to have a number of residents admitted/committed to Westville," while "Norman Beatty Hospital was constantly trying to get Portage Manor to accept patient transfers from there," with letters from Beatty about "runaways" from the Manor who had wound up at the hospital and were asked to be returned.

Beatty's maximum-security division, opened in 1954, took the criminally insane of the whole state; the hospital was converted in 1979 into the Westville Correctional Center, its civil patients transferred to other state hospitals — 18,799 admissions between 1951 and 1979 on the Archives' count. The Logansport tie outlasted it: in 1980, when Portage Manor's admission rules were relaxed, the classes newly admitted included, in the county timeline's quoted words, "'mental patients' from Logansport." No count of this county's commitments across the era is published in the sources reached, and none is constructed here; the paper trail of the commitments themselves — the inquests — is the next entry's subject.

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, its northern and west-central service, its 38,498 admissions to June 2008, and its operation today; and the Beatty Memorial Hospital record: dedicated 1949 at Westville, civil division admitting from seventeen northern Indiana counties from 1951, maximum-security division 1954, conversion to the Westville Correctional Center in 1979, and 18,799 admissions.
2. History of Cass County, Indiana (Helm, 1886), the Northern Indiana Hospital section — the act's county list naming St. Joseph among the twenty-one counties whose insane the Logansport hospital was to provide for.
3. Indiana Division of Mental Health and Addiction (DMHA), Logansport State Hospital history — the 1883 law for the three additional hospitals, the opening of 1 July 1888 with 309 patients under Dr. Joseph G. Rogers, and the 1927 renaming.
4. St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" — the 1966 Westville traffic in both directions, with the Beatty letters as the timeline summarizes them, and the 1980 admission of "mental patients" from Logansport under the ARCH program.