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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Colorado State Hospital Museum 
