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AUDIT ROW #294 · CENTRAL STATE · LOGANSPORT · THE WESTVILLE ROUTE
Before there was a community centre, there was a train ride: this county's committed patients went to the state hospitals, and the routes are named here at the strength the record gives them. The state's first receiving house was Central State Hospital at Indianapolis (opened 1848 as the Indiana Hospital for the Insane; closed 1994) — the default destination for a St. Joseph County commitment through the nineteenth century and deep into the twentieth. The northern route opened with Logansport State Hospital (Longcliff, opened 1888), which served the state's northern counties and took this county's share thereafter. The mid-twentieth-century route was the Norman M. Beatty Memorial Hospital at Westville, the state's northern hospital of the postwar decades, whose admission records hold the era's town-level traffic. Each route is printed with its era and its institution; the patient-level traffic — names, counties of commitment, years — is not printed, because it sits in the receiving hospitals' admission registers and the county's commitment docket (the next article's subject), which are the named settlers for anything below institution strength. The item closes mixed: the traffic's structure and destinations dated, its volume open under its settlers.
Principal sources: Indiana state hospital record (Central State, 1848–1994; Logansport, opened 1888; Beatty Memorial, Westville) at institutional-history strength; settlers named — state hospital admission registers; St. Joseph County commitment docket.