At the last CSHM board meeting we re-visited being open on Saturdays. Like many volunteer organizations, we could ALWAYS use more volunteers to learn the ropes and help run this very unique museum.
The current plan is to check and see how we did on Saturdays this January and then decide what to do in the future. It may be that we’re open only the first and last Saturdays, or not at all. Or EVERY Saturday. We just don’t know at this time.
Come get your very own piece of paper, stamped as official from the Board of Lunacy Commisioners!
I’m planning on being there this coming Saturday, even though I am not signed up for it. Nancy will be there, maybe Nell will stop by, and hopefully we can help anyone who comes in to learn more about Colorado Asylum History.
I’ve been busy in the basement! Here are three new articles I’m working on that will hopefully appear in future issues of the Pueblo Lore:
Article 3: What Insanity Looks Like
This explores a series of old photographs taken by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond (1809-1886) that were later used by Dr John Conolly in a series of 13 papers. The photographs were converted to drawings on stone, and we have a set of them in the Museum! Here’s plate 4, which depicts the looks of Melancholy passing into Mania:
Plate 4 of The Physiognomy of Insanity, by Dr. John Conolly.
Article 4: The Thirteenth Street Review
Did you know that the patients in the Colorado State Hospital had their own self-published newspaper? Yep. It was called “The 13th Street Review” and contained all sorts of interesting things written by patients. I am on the lookout to locate more copies of this publication. We have approximately 22 issues here in our collection, but there may be many more copies out there somewhere, and we’d love to collect ALL of them. It was started in 1939 and was so successful they published it daily for over 20 years!
The 13th Street review: a daily publication by patients at the State Hospital.
Article 5: A Busy Saturday in August of 1908!
This article is practically writing itself, as it jumped out at me and demanded attention. While paging trough one of our old books (a Daily census that tracked which patients were admitted and discharged through the years 1898-1922), I was surprised to see a whole bunch of names written as admissions on one Saturday back in 1908:
Saturday, August 8th, 1908: Welcome to the Asylum all of you!
I Didn’t know why so many women would be brought in on that one particular day. So I searched through old newspapers and found some information. I also worked with Zoi (our wonderful intern) on her research. She’s studying which Hospital building were built, and when they opened for business…
The details will be in the article when I finish writing it.
This old image was scanned from a pile of unclaimed patient possessions we have in our museum collection. I guess ALL of those photos are a mystery, but some just stand out and grab one’s attention. Like this one.
By Hick! This Photo is a Mystery to me.
Obviously this is a staged photo–the kind of thing you’d pay for so you have a souvenir while visiting someplace (Denver, apparently, in this case). The car seems to be a flat sheet of plywood. The Backdrop is also two dimensional. The two guys in the photo, though, they look so real in comparison. The way the guys hands wrap around the 2D steering wheel is wonderful. And the expression on the passenger is just heroically stoic.
I’ll share some more of these from time to time. Stay tuned for more.
Starting this Saturday, January 7th, 2023, the Colorado State Hospital Museum will be open for visitors! The hours will be the same: 10 am to 4 pm.
We’re trying this to see if more people prefer visiting the museum on Saturday, rather than Tuesday. For January 2023, the museum will be open on both Tuesdays and Saturdays.
Here’s an old receipt from 1898 that you can see in the museum!
HIPAA only goes back 50 years, though, and I spend most of my time on patients from the period of 1879 (Opening Day!) to about 1915 or so. The absolute best records we have on patients are from the years 1910-1914. For some reason those records are extremely detailed and rich in descriptions. We are digitizing these records and hope to have transcriptions of them in the future. I will also probably write up several stories for publication in The Pueblo Lore.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for many of these patients. I’d rather honor their existence than have them forgotten.
Here’s one of the pages (the first page, in fact) from one of the many money ledgers we have preserved here at the museum. This is the original purchase of the 40 acres and building that were used at the beginning of the Asylum’s history.
That’s 13 thousand dollars being spent on July 31st of 1879. When you adjust that amount to today’s dollar value, you get just under 400 Thousand dollars.
I have decided to write up an article for The Pueblo Lore covering some of the old technology we have here in the museum. For instance, look at this awesome PBX station from 1964:
I am a technology nerd and especially love OLD technology. Seeing these old relics up close in person is one of the main attractions to our museum.
As part of the article, I’m considering getting some of the old computers up and running, but so far have had little luck getting the wonderful Sperry Univac Uniscope 200 to power up:
Although I primarily focus on the historic patient records, I also love just exploring the museum’s main collection. Here is an unclaimed photograph that belonged to someone. We have a relatively small number of items of this type, and I always consider them a mystery.
Unclaimed Patient Property at the CMHIP Museum
Who are these kids? What is their story? Volunteering at a historical institution will open many doors to explore. History is elusive.
I have been writing my second Pueblo Lore article for a while now, and it has turned into a minor struggle. I have all my notes, old newspaper articles, and original documents, including the Ledger A record for this very interesting patient.
Ledger A record for Doctor “Rynus” [should be Rhynus]
As you can see in the Ledger A record, they misspelled his name. Anyone who studies this period of history will tell you that is quite common. In fact, one of the best articles I have about Dr. Rhynus refers to him as “Dr. Lyman”!
My delay in writing this story is simply that I had to digest so much of this information and sleep on it before it really all fit together.
Doctor Rhynus wrote this book in 1879.
Here’s a few facts. Dr. Rhynus came to Denver from the east coast. He wrote a book about the proper care of insane patients. He and his wife used the Fairview Hotel in Denver as a private asylum. It did not go well. Dr. Rhynus shot and killed his wife. He was found to be insane and that’s how he came to be a patient himself here in Pueblo.
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.
Colorado State Hospital Museum 
