My mother-in-law passed this site along to me and thought of posting it here.

 

http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/

Awesome! Thanks for the link!

 

I should have explored the Ridges more when I was in Athens.

There was a huge, sprawling Romanesque castle in Fort Wayne that was the Indiana School for the Feeble-Minded when I knew about it. It was on beautiful park-like grounds on the north side of town. The site is now Northside Park.

 

When my aunt first started practicing medicine in Fort Wayne pre-WWII, when women weren't welcomed by a lot of hospital staff physicians and really had to prove themselves, a large part of her practice initially was taking care of residents there. I recall her saying that sometimes it was like practicing veterinary medicine in that the patients could not effectively communicate what sypmptoms they were experiencing. Perhaps that helped her develop the extraordinary diagnostic skills for which she became known.

 

When that place was still operating as mostly a warehouse center for handicapped people, a lot of stories came out of it. My grandmother's sister spent almost all her life there, from about age 5 or 6 when rheumatic fever arrested her mental development at about that level, or maybe even younger. I was shocked when I first met her at an aunt's house, a few years after my grandmother had died. To look at her, it was as if my grandmother had come back, the resemblance was so strong. Her demeanor, though, was that of a small, subdued, very well-behaved child. I hate to even think now what sort of behavior modification procedures and/or medications she might have been subjected to.

 

About the time the place closed, there was an article in the newspaper about a man in his sixties who had been there since age 15. All contemporary tests showed him to be of normal intelligence and he was articulate and could read and write. Why was he there? His parents had him committed because they caught him masturbating. They were the only people who could have revoked his commitment. They had died, and he knew of no other living relatives who could assume responsibility for him. He had been there so long without any outside contact that he was afraid to leave and face the world outside on his own. That was in the early 1970s.

I did a write up on a mental hospital in Huntington, W.Va. While not a kirk, it was notoriously overcrowded and can be lumped into the crap that we called mental healthcare back then --

 

 

As a side note, the hospital is very much overcrowded in modern day and was cited as such only a few weeks ago. All of this time and it seems to stay the same.