Scary Mental Health

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We have two female cemeterians who were confined for years in the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, Florida.

In studying their history, I became interested in the general subject of mental institutions in the 19th century and specifically as to why so many women were confined there.  And by whom?

Here is the story of one such woman - confined to an insane asylum in Illinois in 1860 by her husband, The law at that time allowed a husband to commit his wife without a public hearing or her consent. All other persons were by law to have a public hearing before committal.

The Strange Case of Mrs. Elizabeth P. W. Packard

Mrs. Elizabeth P. W. Packard

Her husband, the Reverend Packard was a Calvinist minister with an austere interpretation of his faith, and he claimed his wife's religious views had convinced him that she was "slightly insane," a condition he attributed to "excessive application of body and mind." 

On June 18, 1860, he had her committed to the Illinois State Hospital where she was confined a ward with the criminally insane.

Three years later at the insistence of his now legal-aged son, he signed for her release but on her return home, he locked her in the nursery of their home and nailed the windows shut. She slipped a letter out the window begging for help and a friend took it to a judge who ordered a trial. For although there were no laws to prevent a husband from committing his wife to a insane asylum, there were statutes against holding someone against his/her will within a house.

Testimony Given at the Trial: Abijah Dole, brother-in-law of  Reverend Packard, testified that he knew Elizabeth had become disoriented because she had told him she no longer wished to live with Reverend Packard. Abijah also testified that Elizabeth had requested a letter terminating her membership in her husband's church.

"Was that an indication of insanity?" Elizabeth's lawyer inquired.

"She would not leave the church unless she was insane, “ Abijah replied.

Sarah Rumsey, a young woman who had briefly served as a mother's helper for the Packards, also gave evidence of what she considered Elizabeth Packard's insanity:

"She wanted the flower beds in the front yard cleaned out and tried to get Mr. Packard to do it. He would not. She put on an old dress and went to work and cleaned out the weeds until she was almost melted down with the heat. Then she went to her room and took a bath and dressed herself and lay down exhausted. She was angry & excited & showed ill-will."

On January 18 1860,  the jury reached its verdict in seven minutes. "We, the undersigned, Jurors in the case of Mrs. Elizabeth P. W. Packard, alleged to be insane, having heard the evidence … are satisfied that [she] is sane."

Judge Starr ordered: "that Mrs. Elizabeth P.W. Packard be relieved of all restraints incompatible with her condition as a sane woman."

Neither the judge nor jury addressed the question of whether, had Mrs. Packard been found insane, Mr. Packard had the right to confine her at home rather than in an asylum. 

Amazingly, the Packards remained married but estranged for the remainder of their lives. Elizabeth Packard wrote, lectured, and lobbied on behalf of the rights of women and those alleged to be insane; she was instrumental in changing the commitment laws in four states and in passing a married woman's property law in Illinois.

She founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society and published several books, including Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864), Great Disclosure of Spiritual Wickedness in High Places (1865), The Mystic Key or the Asylum Secret Unlocked (1866) and The Prisoners' Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868). Through her book sales she became financially independent.

After her children were grown, Packard went back to lobbying for people locked up in mental wards. She got a bill passed in Iowa, then in New York. Connecticut followed. Maine was a tougher nut to crack, and so she switched tactics. She decided to go to the federal level and went to Washington, DC.

First, she won over First Lady Julia Grant, then President Grant, and worked on a federal bill with feminist lawyer Belva Lockwood, the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court. The bill was passed.

Traveling by railroad, Packard spent the following fifteen years organizing in 25 other states. She was able to use her influence to change the laws in many of those states, with a greater emphasis on rights of the "insane" as the years went by.

She died July 25, 1897, at age 80.

In the year 1900 - One of our female cemeterians was in Florida's insane asylum. Follow-up in the next two posts.....

Surprise!

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Along the way in my research on Katy CLINCH, I learned that when her grandfather, General Clinch died on November 27, 1849 in Macon, Georgia, he had amassed an estate valued at over two million dollars. And that was a LOT of money in those days!

So how did he amass this treasure on the salary of a General?  You guessed it!  He married it. He wed Eliza Bayard McIntosh. With this union, he married into the McIntosh family - one of the most prominent and wealthy in Georgia.

The McIntosh history drew me deeper and deeper into the history of this part of the country. As I went along, some of the McIntosh names began to sound strangely familiar. It took awhile to get down to his generation, but when I hit upon Van Allen McIntosh, I had found another example of "It's a Small World After All".

The original McIntosh immigrant was John Mohr McIntosh (1699-1761) of Scotland who came with the original Georgia colonists led by General James Oglethorpe.

John McIntosh's Family Tree

His sons were                   GEORGE                                             WILLIAM I
Grandchildren       John Houston McIntosh              William II (Chief of Lower Creeks)
G-Grandchildren   Eliza Bayard McIntosh (Clinch)        Daniel Newnon McIntosh
2G-Grandchildren   George Washington Clinch               Albert Galatin McIntosh
3G-Grandchildren    Katy CLINCH                                   Van Allen McIntosh

Van Allen McIntosh married a girl from New York City by the name of Alta Lulu.  She had been sent down to Georgia to live with some distant cousins in order to get her away from a budding romance with a boy of whom her family greatly disapproved. But when she got to Georgia, she fell head-over-heels for a young man who was the great-grandson of William McIntosh II whose  mother had been a princess of the Lower Creek Tribes. Van Allen was therefore part Creek Indian. And she married him!

My Own Family Tree
John Gilmour - My G-Grandfather
His sons were        Benjamin Gilmour        +               Wesley Gilmour
Grandchildren       Robert Gilmour                          Alta Lulu Gilmour (McIntosh)
G-Grandchildren   Kay Ellen Gilmour (ME)            Alta Helen McIntosh

SO - my first cousin, (once removed), Alta Lulu Gilmour, married a second cousin of Eliza Bayard McIntosh, the grandmother of Katy CLINCH, the infant girl buried off to the side in  a cemetery one block from my home. 

OK - I'm only related to Katy by marriage but our ancestors could have eaten fried chicken, potato salad and haggis at a McIntosh reunion without having to crash the party. 

Alta Lulu Gilmour and Van Allen McIntosh had a daughter, Alta Helen McIntosh Bearman.  I visited her in Macon Georgia in 2007 after finding her on the Internet. She was a tiny lady, and at age 91, sharp as a tack with a wry sense on humor. We shared our knowledge that both of our branches of the Gilmour family tended to be, shall we say, a bit intolerant of cultural differences.  Her mother, Alta Lulu had been dating a Jewish boy in New York and,  for that reason, she was sent into the hinterlands of Georgia where she met and married an Indian!

Alta Helen told me she had always found irony, satisfaction and happiness in the fact that her mother had married into an Indian tribe. She was very happy with her mixed heritage and relished attending the Scottish Highland Games to mingle, dance and sing with her father's people dressed in kilts and Indian headdress.

 Sadly, I learned just before Thanksgiving 2009 that Alta Helen McIntosh Bearman had passed away.

Celia Mackintosh and Alta Helen McIntosh Bearman

Six Degrees of Seperation

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In 2001, I started doing the genealogy research on our cemeterians as practice for using internet sites on my own family's genealogy.  Once I had the hang of the software, I went to work on my Seckner and Gilmour forebears and set the cemetery folks aside for a couple of years. Two years later, as a break from my relatives, I returned to the cemeterians. 

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And in doing so, I found an astounding relationship between two supposedly completely unrelated individuals. Which in turn, led me to research the concept of six degrees of separation. 

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I had always thought it referred to genealogical relationships. I was wrong. Six degrees of separation is states that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances (not blood relatives) with no more than five intermediaries. 

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The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains "

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In 1966, a sociologist, Stanley Milgram, set out to test the hypothesis. He traveled to the mid-western United States and randomly selected a number of people.  He then gave them a wrapped package to be hand delivered to a person (the target) identified only by name, occupation, and general location. In this case, the target was in Massachusetts. 

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The senders were asked to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis whom they thought would be most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it took only between five and seven intermediaries to get each package hand delivered!

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Watch this video for an entertaining explanation of the theory and further testings. 

 And in the next posting, I will tell you how a small child buried off in the corner of the cemetery caught my undivided attention and how this theory hit home.

Book Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The following is the introduction of the 2009 second edition of the cemetery reference book. This blog will publish snippets of the book over the coming months. Any additions, corrections or general comments will be well received.

"The Historic St Nicholas Cemetery, Olive and Linden Streets, Jacksonville, Florida 32207

This small cemetery of just under an acre was originally a parcel of the Francis Bagley Spanish Land Grant. The land for the cemetery was donated by the Holmes family to the  non-denominational Union Church which sat somewhere nearby. The church burned some years later and was not rebuilt.

The cemetery originally served as a pioneer-family burial ground but  later welcomed long-time friends, in-laws, and neighbors of  the originators. The first person interred was William Darius FERRIS in 1849.  Ironically, in 2007, the last person interred  (that year - there has been one burial since) was William Darius FERRIS, the great grandson of the first.

There are 240 graves of which 195 are marked by monuments or stones.  In the database, there are 49 family surnames with 110 women and 130 men. Of the 219 persons with known dates of birth and death, the average age at death was 51. The median age of the group was 30.

·        23 died before the age of 5

•        Another 19 died before their 20th birthday.

•        44 died between 20 and 40 including 17 women of child-bearing age.

•        32 died between 41 and 59

•        61 died between 60 and 79

•        30 died between 80 and 89

•     9 died in their 90s: we have one centenarian, Catherine Ann CALDWELL who lived to see 101.

Various wars swirled around the residents of Florida.  The histories of those wars and the people who fought them are expanded.  With the discovery of one African American Civil War veteran, Henry Liggins, I found proof that people of color are buried in the cemetery.  At least two others, Oratia Adams and Edwin Brown, lie in unmarked graves.  Perhaps the marked graves of two men, Hardy H Phillips and Newton Mayo, with surnames other than those of the families which whom they lay, also hold the remains of trusted servants.

In an earlier short pamphlet, the subject of health and disease was confined to the results of the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1888 with four of its victims found in our cemetery. This work expands those subjects.  The “Great Fire” of 1901 wrecked havoc on the lives of thousands and two of our pioneers in particular. Other disasters and their impact on the cemeterians will be investigated.

The lives of our cemeterians reach out to tell their stories to all who will take the time to listen.  They tell us how they lived and died to make our place in the world. They ask nothing more of us than our support in maintaining the dignity of their final resting place; a commitment that their 2009 neighbors continue to faithfully fulfill as they preserve the dignity of the Historic St Nicholas Cemetery, Jacksonville, Florida.

This narrative is addressed conversationally to these wonderful neighbors, but anyone interested in the history of the times described herein is welcome to read on. You will find the contents in the form a play in three acts with comfortable intermission, and an after party.  Enjoy!"