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.

January 2021 Museum Dates (10am-4pm):

• Tuesday, January 3rd
• Saturday, January 7th
• Tuesday, January 10th
• Saturday, January 14th
• Tuesday, January 17th
• Saturday, January 21st
• Tuesday, January 24th
• Saturday, January 28th
• Tuesday, January 31st

One of the things that I often am asked is, “can you actually use real patient names when you write your articles on them?”

I am well aware of HIPAA.

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:

Perhaps I’ll have more luck with the Compuadd 320 sc….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.