"Sanitarium, just leave me alone..."
Grand Meadow? Well, yeah, I brought it up, but why would ya wanna know about the place? I guess, the place is just creepy. It has too much history and there're too many stories up North Side involving it. Ya sure ya want all this background, its kind of a lot? Alright, it's on ya then.
Not Even a Twinkle in the Eye
So back before UC was even a consideration, the most ya could find out this way was some plains, a river, and a whole mess of angry natives. The Otoe counted the area north of North Side as their lands, but avoided the space around where Grand Meadow is. "Ancient burial grounds"? Nah, or if it is, it wasn't their burial grounds. Ya'd have to track down a scholar in that sort of thing. All I ever heard was talk of mounds that they didn't go near.
Europeans came through earlier but it wasn't until the 1790s that any of them settled near Union City. A few outposts and river crossings sprung up, and that's what brought James Teesdale here. Rumors follow the rich and powerful and by all accounts, he was both. A supposed occultist, Teesdale built a mansion or hunting lodge, local history isn't exactly clear on it, not far from the river, close to the Otoe's mounds, despite all of their warnings to the contrary. So it isn't real surprising that the house burned to the ground in 1812. No one knows what started the fire, but only his eldest son escaped it, with both his wife and daughter away at the time.
The Teesdale homestead sat there untouched for almost 40 years, before it was purchased by a preacher man, Reverend Benjamin Bodycombe. Like Joseph Smith, he claimed visions led him to the place and he started a commune to practice his branch of Protestantism. History says it was all communal wives and vegetarianism. Sounds like a real party. Union City officially became a city not long after that, and Bodycombe's people weren't too popular with the townsfolk. Within a couple of years, they cut all ties and communication with UC. That's when it gets tragic. See, summer of 1857, Reverend Bodycombe and almost all of his followers committed mass suicide. The Reverend himself swallowed the barrel of a rifle. Only two little girls were found alive, but they didn't live much longer.
Foundation and Early Days
Yeah, ya think there's some rocky stuff back then, hold on. The land went up for auction, and a doctor from the East Coast, Ignatius Hopper, bought it. For a dollar. Ya can still find the submission of the plans for a sanitarium to be built there, using something called the "Kirkbride Plan." No idea what that actually means. Sounds fancy. Meadow Sanitarium, as it was called back then, was complete in 1862. We weren't a state during the Civil War but the fighting sometimes spilled over this way, and the government made use of the place as a military hospital. It wasn't until 1866 that Hopper was back in charge. He was as much a businessman as he was a doctor, and he pulled big money from back east to add to the sanitarium's grounds, building a bunch of extra housing units. They're still there, Hampden House, and all of that. If ya ever end up there, ya can see them.
Running a sanitarium must take a lot out of a guy 'cause Dr Hopper took a year long sabbatical in 1870, putting Dr Albert Cave in charge of the place until his return in 1871. Newspapers from back then have picture of the good doctor looking like he aged ten years in the space of one. Anyway, during Cave's tenure as Deputy Director, the sanitarium begins specializing in clinical insanity ahead of anything else. He's also the first to institute, see what I did there? a tier program for rich patients to get amazing care while the poor and wretched were often neglected. Unfortunately for him, he was trampled to death by a horse in 1881. Dr Edward Brake was tapped to be his replacement.
Brake became the Director when Hopper died in 1898, and one of his first acts was to have a statue of Hopper sculpted. Last time I was there, I swear the statue was watching me. What? No, I was visiting, not a resident. I'm not that crazy, yet.
Brave New Century
Things went great, I assume, until they didn't. Ya probably heard about the 1906 riot? No? It made national headlines back then. A handful of abused patients started an uprising in the East Wing of the sanitarium, killing three people and then setting a fire which killed another 130 or so.
Brake was the "turn a frown upside down" type of guy, and took the opportunity to improve the facilities. He had the burnt out wing demolished so that a newer, more modern one could be built. Rumor is that he connected the basements of the East Wing to the tunnels that already existed under the grounds, but I've never met anyone brave enough to check it out.
In 1908, two of Brake's staff were charged with negligence that led to the patient deaths from the fire. It was argued that by leaving the mentally ill strapped to beds, they had no way to save themselves. Justice was a fickle thing back then, however, and the staffers were acquitted of all charges.
1917 saw the death of Dr Brake by hanging suicide in his East Wing office. His successor, Donald Roe, found out that Brake had put the hospital into a poor financial position, and made plans to fix it. His plans were almost as short lived as his tenure, because he was strangled by a patient in 1920. Yeah, I know, a lot of Directors have died in the course of Grand Meadow's history. It doesn't stop there though.
The Dark Ages
The Nazis are best known for their eugenics program, but most of their ideas, they took from Americans. Of course, we got them back when German science aided us in building a-bombs and cruise missiles. Ah, so, Farnsworth Weaver became the next Director. He led a drug company back then, and wasn't a doctor himself, so he hired the now-infamous Dr Matthew Gorlay to be his head of medicine. Yeah, -that- Gorlay.
Then I probably don't have to tell you about the hundreds of patients that died from his experiments into lobotomy and sensory deprivation and extreme torture techniques. Did you know that Guantanamo Bay still uses some of the tricks he devised on terrorism suspects? That's what I've heard.
1933 was a bad year for the hospital. That's when Thomas Werner uncovered Gorlay's experiments and, over Weaver's objections, brought them to a medical ethics committee. The whole sordid affair has been made into numerous movies and I'm pretty sure a season of that murder story show. Gorlay was arrested for his medical fraud and Weaver ended up in prison for embezzlement. Of course, Gorlay committed suicide in his cell and Weaver died of stomach cancer years down the road. Thomas Werner was practically a hero back then, but no hospital administrator wanted to hire him. Probably because they had their own dirty laundry.
World Wide War
After Weaver died, the hospital went through a bit of an upheaval, since he owned the majority share of it. Werner stepped in and purchased it when no one else would, for one dollar. I know, that is a crazy coincidence.
During the war, in 1944, Werner pushed for the facility, simply Meadow Hospital, to be reopened with a focus on helping returning military men get right in the head. War is Hell and Werner recognized that many soldiers with "exhaustion," the term for PTSD back then, would need a facility that understood their mental struggles. It was a short term solution though, and the hospital only stayed open for a couple of years.
Werner received the Key to Union City back then, going into the '50s. And another award for public service. because of that, he was able to gather up enough funding to get the hospital opened back up for general use in '52.
He retired back in 1954 and the Board of Trustees, his group of investors, named Jeremiah Moorcock as the new Director. After Werner died in 1955, this guy worked the Board into returning Meadow to its old ways as a facility for the medically and criminally insane.
Moorcock reopened most of the East Wing and by '57, there weren't any more patients there for medical care. The same year, the name was changed to Grand Meadow Psychiatric Institute. Right, because it was such a place of learning, ya know? As a nod to that idea though, Moorcock built an addition to the medical center and named it after Werner, the Thomas Werner Annexe.
With the TWA dedicated to his "studies," Moorcock performed hundreds of lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy experiments in the name of science. Yeah, electroshock. Never heard of that helping anyone, either. He kept meticulous notes that you can find if you know what books to look up. It came to a boil in '68 when he performed a lobotomy on a girl that was just tripping on acid. Her parents sued, he won, but it brought more scrutiny back to the hospital and someone eventually decided to act the role of karma in '73, when Moorcock was lobotomized by an assailant that they never found.
Ultra Modern Times
Johnathan Sendak took over after that, and did his best to clean the Institute up. Lobotomies and ECT was thrown into the trash heap as not conducive to true scientific advancement. There are still some bitter locals from back then, as Sendak fired a good portion of the staff and hired out-of-towners as replacements. He even convinced the Board of Trustees to sell a large portion of their share in Grand Meadow to a Japanese firm called Teijin in the late 70s, just ahead of the "Japanese Invasion" craze of the 80s. Teijin jumped into things on the condition that they chose the Deputy Director of the facility, and Sendak hired Dr Thomas Bateman on their recommendations.
About a year after the Teijin purchase, Sendak talked the Board into divesting themselves of their remaining interests, and the shares were split between Eisai and Mitsubishi Tanabe, two of Teijin's rival Japanese pharmaceutical manufacturers. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember the waves that caused in town, since Union City has never had a large Japanese population. Well, I'll show ya Chinatown, but that isn't the same. Sorry, I know some people think all "slant eyes" are the same. Not implying anything. Ya look like a good person.
The struggle between the companies made it harder for Grand Meadow to treat its patients, but when Bateman became the Director after Sendak's retirement, he worked hard to bring modern psychiatric techniques into the forefront of the Institute. He even made some documented breakthroughs with therapy techniques, all while dealing with ongoing pay disputes. The hospital continually lost money through the 80s, and Teijin was eventually able to buy out their competitors, even if they stopped looking at Grand Meadow as a profitable venture.
Ready for another tragic turn? In 1991, Bateman murdered his assistant and ran off with as much money from the hospital as he could. Ironically, he claimed temporary insanity and could never explain why he did it. Almost as ironically is that he was killed in prison by a former Grand Meadow patient. After his arrest, Dr Bridget McClusky became the first female Director hired on. Hey. women can do anything. And I guess she did a good job, since Grand Meadow mostly stayed out of the news, until she stepped down in 2006. The stress of the job would get to anyone with that kind of history to deal with.
Dr Kumiko Noguchi, a stunning lady from Kyoto City and yes, I sure do like seeing her picture in the papers, runs the facility now. I still wouldn't want to be locked up in the place, and if ya ever have to visit anyone, make it a short visit, but I sure wouldn't be mad if she wanted to spend time in a padded room with me, if ya know what I mean.
Yeah, every now and then there is a big to-do about someone famous going there for treatment, and kids make up urban legends about escapees killing whole families in the park near it, but I wouldn't dwell on that too much if ya go North Side. Just, stay off the bridge across the river late at night. It's for the best.
----Jon De Luca, $5 tour guide
++++
Grand Meadow Timeline
< 1790s - Otoe Natives consider the area their territory, but shun it due to supersition of underground mounds in the vicinity
1794/1795 - first European settlements in the area
1798 - James Teesdale arrives, builds mansion/hunting lodge to the north on Otoe land, despite warnings
1799 - Completion of the Teesdale Mansion
1803 - Louisiana Purchase, area becomes US territory
1812 - War with Britain, Teesdale Mansion burns to the ground, most of the family dies
1822 - Bellevue becomes first NE town
1833 - Moses Merril Mission built southwest of Bellevue, US govt relocates the remaining Otoe in the region there, none remain north of UC by 1841
1851 - Benjamin Bodycombe purchases the land from the remaining Teesdale descendants, establishes a commune
4 July 1854 - Union City officially founded
(Jan) 1857 - Issues with UC cause Bodycombe and his followers to withdraw from "polite society," neither he nor his adult followers are seen alive again|
(July) 1857 - Bodycombe and his followers commit mass suicide. Only two survivors, seven year old girls, are found. They're dead within a year.
1861 - Dr Ignatius Hopper purchases the land at auction for $1, and submits plans to the City Council for a sanitarium based on the Kirkbride Plan, he designs the place with help of local architect Jonathan Teesdale, who adds personal touches like the sculpting of six saints on the front face of the main building
28 Feb 1862 - Meadow Sanitarium is complete amidst spillover fighting from the Civil War
9 June 1862 - The US government makes use of the sanitarium as a military hospital
1866 - Dr Hopper regains full control of the hospital
1868 - With a series of shrewd business deals and investors, Hopper is able to expand the grounds of the facility, and secure prestigious East Coast patients. Hampden House, Whitehall House, Brochardt House, and Maxwell Gymnasium are all built at this time and named after Hopper's investment partners, with his own offices in the East Wing of the main building.
1870 - Dr Hopper experiences a breakdown and takes a leave of absence from the hospital, as Dr Albert Cave takes over as interim Director
19 Jan 1871 - Dr Hopper returns, names Dr Cave as as Deputy Director. Local papers speculate on his leave of absence as he returns looking aged a decade. Dr Cave transitions the hospital towards a specialization in the insane
27 Mar 1876 - Meadow Sanitarium is renamed Meadow Asylum for the Insane. Dr Cave institutes a heavier "pay for treatment" plan wherein the rich are basically given top tier medical care in private suites whilst the poor are subjected to beatings, loss of human comforts, and isolation
1881 - Building of Chesterton Hall and Platte House, massive barn renovations
16 June 1894 - Albert Cave is trampled to death by carriage horse transporting wealthy patient, no report of what spooked the horse, Dr Edward Brake takes his place as Deputy
1898 - Dr Hopper dies in his office of an apparent heart attack, Dr Brake becomes Director of Meadow Asylum. He commissions a statue of Dr Hopper sculpted by Frank Teesdale, to be erected at one side of the main drive. It still stands there.
10 Nov 1906 - Patients from the lower wards (the "poor wards") revolt against their treatment, attacking staff and attempting to escape the hospital. Three staff are killed in the attempt and a blaze erupts in the East Wing, gutting it, and causing the loss of 17 more staff, along with 116 patients, before it is contained.
1907 - Brake starts a renovation of the hospital, beginning with the demolishing of the East Wing. Plans for a more modern facility are drawn up with the aid of Frank Teesdale, utilizing preexisting tunnels for the buildings sub-basements. When the building is complete, however, Dr Brake orders the sub-basements to be sealed.
16 Jan 1908 - Two faculty members, accused of being responsible for the deaths of so many patients in the East Wing, are acquitted of all charges
1917 - Brake's body is found hanging by his belt from a light fitting in his office, Dr Donald Roe takes control of the facility and discovers Brake over-leveraged the hospital's finances during reconstruction, he works on plans to fix the situation
1919 - Six patients are found dead from starvation in a basement room, no staff is ever investigated for the incident
23 Oct 1920 - A patient suffering from delusional psychosis strangles Dr Roe in his office, then slits his own throat with a scalpel. Afterwards, the Board of Trustees finally see the dire financial straits of the hospital
(March) 1921 - Following months of uncertainty, Farnsworth Weaver, president of Weaver Pharmaceuticals, is appointed as Director. Not a doctor himself, he hires Dr. Matthew Gorlay to be Head of Medicine
1922 - Weaver renovates Hampden House, which had gone unused for a decade, to be used as his private offices. The East Wing office space is turned into apartments for wealthy patients. Dr Gorlay, a fan of eugenics-based pseudo science, begins to conduct experiments on patients
1927 - An orderly is arrested and tried for running an illegal still. The booze created causes blindness in at least half a dozen patients.
1930 - A patient riot in the lower East Wing, much smaller than the 1906 incident, occurs, leading to the death of 17 patients and five staff members. It is allegedly incited by one of Gorlay's test subjects
1933 - James Sercombe, a 21-year diagnosed with "Mongolian idiocy" (now known as Downs Syndrome) dies of a brain hemorrhage. Dr Gorlay is out of town at the time and the autopsy duties fall to Dr Thomas Werner, a new appointee to the staff. Dr. Werner discovers that Sercombe was subjected to 14 different surgeries prior to his death, the last of which directly caused the fatality. Though ordered to cover up the findings by Weaver, Dr Werner goes to the AMA Ethics Committee. In the course of investigation, its found that Gorlay covered up the deaths of over 300 patients in the course of 12 years, and the needless maiming of another 100. His is arrested for medical fraud, and Weaver, aware of his practices, is arrested for embezzling hospital funds. Sentenced to only five years in prison, Gorlay nevertheless commits suicide within two weeks of being sentenced. Meadow is shut down and even those doctors, like Werner, not charged with a crime, have trouble finding work through the Depression.
1939 - Weaver dies from stomach cancer whilst in prison. With no heirs, his assets are liquidated and the closed hospital is sold to Thomas Werner at auction for $1.
1944 - Werner pushes for the facility, now Meadow Hospital, to be reopened as a veterans care facility. With a grant from the US Army, the West Wing of the hospital is dedicated to those returning from World War II and suffering from "exhaustion" (PTSD), Union City refers to the hospital as "The Purple Heart" for this, a name that sticks into the '70s.
1946 - With the end of the war and the need for veteran mental care (falsely) believed to be extraneous, the hospital once again closes due to funding. Werner is awarded the Key to the City by UC's mayor, Alexander Teesdale. A month later, Werner receives the Commander's Award for Public Service. With his reputation restored, he begins a campaign to bring investors back to "his" hospital
1952 - This sterling reputation pays off, as Werner secures funding to reopen as a hospice and long term care facility for the developmentally disabled
1954 - Werner retires and whilst technically the owner of the hospital, the Board of Trustees names Dr. Jeremiah Moorcock as his successor, despite his objections. Moorcock is a firm believer in psychosurgery and retrieves as many of the old asylum files from the County Clerk as possible
(April) 1955 - Thomas Werner dies of a heart attack. Moorcock convinces the Board to return Meadow to its days as an institute for the insane. Within five years, it once again becomes the kind of place that people send their afflicted family members to forget about
1956 - Moorcock reopens three wards in the East Wing and expands the Medical Center
1957 - The last solely medical patient is transferred from the hospital, renamed the Grand Meadow Psychiatric Institute after all of the expansions
1959 - Moorcock adds a small extension to the Medical Center, called the Thomas Werner Annexe. It is dedicated to psychosurgery and ECT, and Moorcock will perform more than 500 lobotomies there
1968 - Alison Purchase, a 19 year old Southern California native, is brought to the hospital by police after suffering a bad LSD trip. Once the drug has passed through her system, she (rightfully) protests that she doesn't belong at Grand Meadow. After causing hundreds of dollars in damages to her ward, Moorcock performs a frontal lobotomy that leaves her docile, but incontinent. Her parents file a lawsuit, which he successfully defends himself against
1 Aug 1973 - Dr Moorcock receives a transorbital lobotomy from person or persons unknown
1974 - After spending considerable time and assets to keep Moorcock's fate out of the press, the Board of Trustees appoints an outsider, Dr Johnathan Sendak, to the Directorship. Appalled at Moorcock's techniques, he systematically fires many of the individuals involved and demolishes the Thomas Werner Annexe, in an attempt to make the hospital far more progressive in treatment
1977 - Sendak convinces the Board to sell half of the hospital's assets to Teijin, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, to make up for expenses occurred during Moorcock's administration. Teijin encourages Sendak to hire Dr Thomas Bateman as his assistant
1978 - Against Bateman's advice, Sendak convinces the Board to divest their remaining interest in the hospital to pharma companies Eisai and Mitsubishi Tanabe, themselves Teijin competitors. These leads to numerous power plays between the three which impact the hospital's ability to treat the insane
1980 - Sendak retires, Bateman becomes Director. Due to a pay dispute, his relationship with Teijin worsens. He embarks on an ambitious program to ultra modernize the facilities, including reopening the entirety of the East Wing. He repurposes Brochardt House into a school house, and Whitehall House as a dorm for visiting interns. Profits plummet over the next ten years. Whilst the pharmaceutical firms return control, they soon lose interest in Grand Meadow as a money making venture.
(April) 1991 - Dr Bateman murders his assistant, Dr Zachary Teesdale, with a scalpel, and absconds with the previous years profit. Investigations reveal that the plummet in profits was partially attributed to Bateman's embezzlement
(June) 1991 - Police apprehend Bateman
(January) 1992 - Bateman pleads guilty to murder and embezzlement, but under diminished faculties. He claims that he doesn't know why he killed his assistant, only that he felt compelled to do so. He is sentenced to 26 years in a county correctional facility. Dr Bridget McClusky is appointed Director of Grand Meadow, the first woman in its history to hold the title
4 March 1993 - Adam Barker, a former patient of Grand Meadow, beats Bateman to death in prison
2006 - Citing extreme exhaustion and stress, Dr McClusky retires. Teijin, now the sole backers of the facility, transfers in Dr Kumiko Noguchi from their Kyoto City branch. She brings Grand Meadow into the new millennium with multiple technology advances
Just a few minutes from I-680
(From World of Darkness: Asylum)
(OON - World of Darkness: Asylum is one of the best books in my collection. Grand Meadow is a version of Bishopsgate intertwined with the history of Union City. The book version was definitely written to be placed within the original colonies, so I had to move the timeline up a hundred years to fit with real world settlements in what eventually became Nebraska, but once I got there, it was pretty easy to slide it into the narrative. It follows so many horror movie tropes and cliches that it is almost impossible not to love the idea.)
