All posts by RichardG

I am a volunteer archivist at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo Museum.
Patients, Updates

The First 11 Patients Article Published

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In the August 2022 issue of The Pueblo Lore there is an article I wrote about the first eleven patients at the Asylum on the first day it was opened: October 23rd, 1879. The Lore is published by the Pueblo County Historical Society, another one of my volunteering gigs.

In the article, I summarize as much as I could find out about the patients that were here at the Asylum on opening day.

Patient Index, page 184

Of course it all started with Patient #1: Moses Milsap. You can see his entry in the Patient Index and see the “a-1” classification after his name. Moses was an epileptic after sustaining a serious head injury back in 1862. In the time between his injury and Day One, Moses made the newspapers several times, having been in trouble in Jamestown and Denver. Unfortunately, Moses only lived for eleven months after being institutionalized. He died on Thursday, September 23rd, 1880. He was probably 50 years old.

Copies of the August 2022 issue can be purchased from the Pueblo County Historical Association.

Artifacts, Updates

Designing a Logo

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Today at the museum we worked on designing a logo. We started with a photograph of one of our heavy iron gate insignias. These used to be on the 13th street entrance to the Asylum.

Colorado State Insane Asylum Gate Insignia

We like how these look, and used GIMP and Inkscape to produce an SVG version. Mostly we were just kind of seeing what we could come up with in just an hour or so. We’ll need something simpler for a small web logo, but are using it for now. The results would look good on a Tshirt design.

Vector Graphics version of CSIA Museum logo.
Updates

A Special Visitor

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A few weeks ago we had a special visitor from Canada come to our museum. Gerald Wexler won awards for co-writing the screenplay to Margaret’s Museum.

Margaret’s Museum official poster.

I had a lot of fun sharing some of our old patient records with Mr. Wexler. I have always thought that Pueblo and our Asylum’s history would make an excellent series for television, kind of like American Horror Story.

Updates

Aug 2022 Update: COVID

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Well, the development of this website took a short delay over the past two weeks, as I came down with COVID and had to stay home. I slept more than anything else, so it’s nice to be back at the Museum and working on things.

This blog will hopefully find a comfortable existence here and be updated regularly with things like THE ARTIFACT OF THE WEEK, or DID YOU KNOW? type posts. Until then, it’s just a place to document what needs to be done on this site. Our main page is misbehaving as I write this, showing double content. Our URL is currently blocked by the State Hospital, so to check anything out I have to pull it up on my phone.

So, back to work.

Updates

Hello World!

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This is the first post on the blog that we are developing for the Colorado State Hospital Museum. This blog will feature some of the most interesting artifacts and stories that we come across while studying the museum’s old tomes.

Just a sample of the old books we have, dating back to the Hospital’s beginning in 1879.

This site is proudly run by volunteers. Right now it is very bare-bones, but we plan on changing that. We certainly plan on the blog being the main place on the site for interesting news and features. Other than that, we want to make sure that people know where we are and how they can visit us.