Exploring Place
Lindsay Morrison
Menoukha Case/Exploring Place
18 October 2008
Chatauqua County: Dewittville Poorhouse
This is what happened:
First I drove to Dewittville in the surreal light of back roads at four in the afternoon. The road forks and becomes something else just before you reach the cemetery and there’s no monument or sign to indicate what was there before.
I thought we had the wrong place.
I wandered around the cemetery in a stupor trying not to look suspicious, trying to recognize names from the website about the poorhouse cemetery, nothing ringing a bell.
My younger sister, four months pregnant was with me.
She stepped in dog crap, went back to the car to sit with her feet hanging outside my ’94 Dodge Spirit to scrape the waste out of the cracks in her soles while I continued the search.
I had my camera with me, so I took a picture of the big base of the tree that had conjoined with a headstone so smooth it was eroded faceless, looking like one big tooth at the root. I couldn’t feel if I was in the right place, I wanted to go have lunch in town and ask a waitress but my sister was insecure about her fouled foot.
We noticed a driveway beyond the cemetery with a little bridge over a creek.
Our grandmother had told me there was a bridge near the poorhouse where her and my grandfather used to go fishing. Was this the sign I was looking for? There was a mound covered in a white plastic tarp and tires. Brittany said, how can my shoe still smell so bad? I said I think it’s coming from that pile, not your foot.
There was a NO TRESPASSING sign fixed on a tree. We drove over the bridge anyway because that was the only way I could turn around.
This movement led me to a little cul de sac of shaded barns and large buildings spread apart. Maybe this was the ruins of the Poorhouse but I felt watched and we turned around quickly and drove home.
The second time I drove to Dewittville I came alone and with different directions. They still led me to the same place, which I still couldn’t believe was completely legitimate, so I went to the Post Office. The Postal ladies sent me to the man who lives across the street from the cemetery–Parker’s Greenhouse–with his yardful of kittens and his mysterious bandaged wrist.
Mr. Parker showed me an article he had in an old frame, an article from the Post Journal from 1992 and pictures of the grounds. I was in the right place– he lived across from it, and he pointed from his driveway, and as I looked from his driveway I felt a heavy gratitude of perspective for my chosen time and place; it’s the kind of research you can’t recreate or look for, it just happens to you if you should be so lucky and if the Post Office is open and if you happen to go in and ask.
It’s laughable now to think that originally I thought I could know my place through all the editorials of my counties newspapers from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, as if the history and microfiche could be some kind of Googled.
I went to the Darwin R. Barker Museum in my town, extremely nervous, only to be horrified that the person working was some college girl my age which greatly accelerated my intimidation. However, it started to rain outside, and the girl explained so kindly the limitations of microfilm to me that I felt much more at ease, and she wrote the numbers down of several historical institutions, and the rain outside was cozy, and she said offered to turn more lights on in the empty museum if I wanted to stay awhile and look around–so I painstakingly read every single piece of text on the wall next to every local history artifact. I hadn’t been to this museum since middle school. Did I mention it was raining outside and the museum was empty? It was surreal just like the yardful of kittens across from the old poorhouse—and I was still connected to the poorhouse here, because it was the reason I was there, even though progress was slow.
It’s 9 a.m. one morning: I head to the Patterson Library twenty minutes from my town in Westfield, NY where the poorhouse records, book one and two are kept in a special Local History room and can not be checked-out into circulation. I know about the existence of the record books from the 1992 article of Mr. Parker the Greenhouse man. A librarian takes me to the uppermost chamber of the building where all the weird local history books are kept. Of course, it was blowing my mind, and by the time I was sitting down by myself at a wooden desk and had gotten through the first 11 pages, I was crying–because that’s what facing reality does to me, after not really believing it for so long. It’s just so strange that you can go to a room and find a whole actual world, with old immigrant names, and history is hard enough to believe, but local history is even harder. But there it sits, whether you acknowledge it or not, right there in this little room bound in volume after volume, and that world just grows, you can’t catch up with it.
The records include all of the following as causes for admittance to the Poorhouse:
blindness
intemperance
fits
sickness
cripple
lunacy
want of capacity
old age
intemp. indirect
unk.
unkind father
infant
bastardy
lameness
idiocy
ill temper
infirmity
crime
mute
dropsey
prostitution
feeble
sore eyes
ague
destitute
“lazy, I guess”
debauchery of mother
railroad injuries
ugliness [DOLLY SIMMONS 57, F, from Massachusetts]
rheumatism
indolence
drunken debauch
“said to be sick”
“decrepid etc.”
deaf & dumb & inhumanity of mother [JOSEPHINE GOODMAN]
want of employment
dwarf
husband absconded
mother’s w/o cap
licentiousness
broken limb
husband’s crime
want of a father
crime of a father
abandoned by husband
orphan
palsy
poverty
Dunkirk/sentence of 40 days for vagrancy on a warrant [John Justus Bortner]
“arm off/came for a few days”
“hard boy”
“the murderer” from lunatic asylum Thomas Sanderson 11 Nov 1859
“prostitution” crossed out replaced by lunacy” [POLLY THORPE]
cause: “everything”
Here are a few of the more detailed records from Book 2:
LEWIS Thomas: admitted at age 20 Nov 26, 1846, single, born Lexington, KY, only information about parents: they were laboring slaves…This man was a slave who ran away from Kentucky when a boy…is not very smart but a good worker and a comfortable negro to have about.
PIER Edna L: adm Jan 21, 1914 age 28 5 ch w relatives. This is the woman who was in the house with Edward Beardsley at Summerdale for 8 days holding the Sheriff at bay with a Winchester…was accidentally shot in the leg by a revolver bing knocked off a box by one of the 9 children who were in the house, 5 of whom were her own children.
SMITH Leonard: admitted Nov 20, 1858, born Garland, Wayne Co. NY, parents b Spafford, Onondaga Co. NY, father a merchant, mother clerk in the store…well-educated, was clerk in store and made a good appearance and good work record. Has been to Utica Asylum and returned…By indulging in masturbation he became insane and as a consequence will spend his days at this or some similar institution.
CODNER David: admitted at age 77, Widower, Dec 6 1861, born in South Kingston RI, parents both b RI. This man was a soldier in War of 1812 but failed to have papers sufficient to get a pension…has been very intemperate all his days. Three children living, all self-supporting.
My intentions originally were to derive something from the editorials of the time. Perhaps it’s not impossible still–but with my ability to search the archives of all newspaper history from my county in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century, it was theoretically, logistically daunting enough so as to be impossible.
I made the executive decision based on gut feeling that the significance of the Poorhouse was palpable still vis a vis the Alms House Books (1 and 2) and that the implications of the County Nursing Home in Dunkirk would have to be assessed subjectively from my limited perspective through the lens of the greatest possible level of consideration.
I can’t say with any impunity what it was like to live and to die at the Dewittville Poorhouse but it’s no picnic at the county home in Dunkirk which took up the slack in it’s wake, or at mental institutions, which are part of the legacy of poorhouses. Church groups volunteer to come and sing, children’s choruses visit and the more able bodied are wheeled out to visited or participate, especially around Christmas. Coherence is low and medication is high. It’s a boring, depressing, disinfectant-aromaed place with a creepy pleasant slogan (“There’s no place like our home”) like every county home across the country. But what are we to do? People need a place to go the same as they always have when no one can take them in and they can’t support themselves.
At the Poorhouse you had to work and the fruits of your labor were given to the county to sell–it was the county’s property. Your children could be indentured out, for their supposed well-being…to stop the cycle of neediness. They’re not adopted, they’ll be learning servants, but they’ll be well taken care of and the tax payers are pleased.
At a county home or a mental institution you’re not sentenced to labor, although it still costs money one way or another for you to be there, and instead of activity and productivity, you sort of stagnate, except for the well planned bureaucratic “program activities” which are often reluctantly, when they are indeed participated in at all, by the actual residents for whom they are intended for.
I’m attracted to the imperfect, to the underdogs, to the debauchery, the sinners, the “prostitution crossed out replaced by lunacy,” all the dozens of lost masturbators, and the comfortable Negroes to have about, I’m attracted to the stories of real people and the beauty in coincidences and flaws. I’m reluctant to come to a conclusion on what it was like in those poorhouses, and the one in Dewittville specifically. Dewittville is a place that glows in rural magnificence, it’s a very small town, but you get the feeling driving by the goldenrod that you have to hold your hand to the wheel to resist the urge not to go lie in a field somewhere and just stay there until you die (“lazy, I guess”).
I’ve stared and stared at the black and white picture of the Alms house administration building that Mr. Parker gave me. I don’t know what to make of it. It reminds me of a college more than a place of desperation, and there were horse barns in an aerial view, etc. It’s hard to get a sense of what it really looked like and SMELLED like and the lice and cold, the rules, the hunger, the day to day mood, was it a sense of community, of outsiders together, or is that romanticizing what is a place where, as the records show, people were just found dead and then buried. Children were indentured into adulthood. There were notes of vendue throughout New York state, people were auctioned and there is no aspect of fairness more than dog crap on a shoe in a cemetery.
Works Cited
Barden, Virginia W., Lois Barris, and Norwood J. Barris. Chautauqua County Alms House and Asylum. Fredonia: Chautauqua County Genealogical Society, 1992.
Crannell, Linda. “Over The Hill To The Poor-House.” The Poorhouse Story. 2000. 3 Oct. 2008
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Lindsay Morrison
5 November 2008
Professor Case
Exploring Place: The Entire County of Chautauqua: In a Heart Wrenching Nutshell!
I’m going to be really honest–I’m lost. I think I might be losing my mind. I should have asked for help sooner (on the project) but I didn’t, and I should have been more insistent with the County Mental Hygiene office, considering how slow and overworked they are but I hardly have the energy to breathe. I don’t know what my second place based assignment was supposed to be on, but I’ve chosen to write what I’ve given an insane amount of consideration to, and that is, this place where I live, this general area, with no particular boundary, except in what I consider things that don’t fit the qualities I am about to embrace as belonging to this general area, largely my county, but not only my county, also places where my car has managed to take me and I have seen continuities of our place.
My mom liked to move houses every couple of years, we always thought she had some kind of compulsion, but later my parents explained it was a kind of financial juggling attempt, who knows, the point is, we went to a lot of Open House tours in different towns within the county, spent time considering the fantasy of living in different school zones, saw the view from many different yard sales, and it was this early daydreaming and pseudo-cultural-anthropology, and the questions I had that real estate agents didn’t have statistics for, that first initiated me into the mindset of places.
There is so much to tell you about this place, I want to talk about the rural part, the factory parts, the immigrant history, the classic football rivalry between the rich town and the poor town; I want to talk about the county fair and try to identify the reasons why it depresses me, I want to talk about the funny thing I’ve noticed about our editorials and what it was like being an adult with a newspaper delivery route—during the manhunt for Ralph Bucky Philips. I also want to talk about the geological history, the tragic urban renewal, and now my ambiguous feelings towards the new tourism project.
Before I say something embarrassingly incriminating in analysis of my beloved place, I want to preface this by telling you it is by all means an account of essentially, a foolish hermit, but the Gladys Kravitz of foolish hermits, and I honestly mean well.
Without any further hesitation, I will start with the idea, the idea that slides around in my mind when I drive around the curving Fredonia-Stockton Rd. that hugs the sloping pastures and hilly woods—this area was once underneath a mile of glacial ice and it was once under a warm, shallow sea. The pastures themselves deep below them have the remains of shelly marine life fossilized in evidence. But who lives in Stockton, at the end of that particular road I am thinking of? There is a blinking red light where a recently renovated restaurant offers Cajun Shrimp on Thursdays and Marilyn Monroe’s picture hangs on the flashy red “saloon” wall, but there are no stores in town, no gas station, and hardly any remaining people, except a couple of my relatives–including a 104 year old aunt. This is the same town where infamous Ralph “Bucky” Philips was born, the car-thief-turned-fugitive-turned-cop-killer. I will come back to this later.
Within Chautauqua County are many conflicting identities and ideals, it’s part of who we seem to be, I don’t mean it in a bad way, it’s just something I’ve noticed, it’s certain to be part of every place where humans try to get along.
If you cross a little green metal bridge from Silver Creek to Irving, you will have left Chautauqua County for a minute and you will be on the Seneca reservation. There you can see a taxidermal version of a bison at a gas pump, or you can enter a raffle to win a Hummer. If this is all too much for your constitution to bear, you can come back more towards the center of our place, maybe stop at Wal Mart and see an Amish/Mennonite/? family in aisle 256. We also have something called the Portland Zoo which is somebody’s yard with colorful cutouts of animals propped up, Portland is a village, not even a town, and it contains also a trailer park called “Pleasant Acres,” which is as creepy as you can imagine, though surrounded by a picturesque plot of vineyards.
I think that the number one crime in this area is probably driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. My sister calls this “the South of the North,” to which I suppose she speaks of the tendency towards rusticity and conservative values, but then there is the other half of it, the SUNY Fredonia element, the Chautauqua Institute crowd, the fact that Lily Dale and the spiritualist community has it’s history in little Cassadaga and that it was visited by no less than Mahatma Ghandi and Susan B. Anthony. And what of the abolitionists that worked the Underground Railroad using the Canadaway Creek right in my down town, Fredonia, straight to Lake Erie and then to freedom? And what of the fact that Mark Twain chose a house on Central Avenue of this very town I live in, Fredonia, for his sister, and the man from Fredonia ran his publishing company?
There is a great discrepancy between Fredonia and Dunkirk, two neighboring places within this county with rival sports teams and socio-economic histories. Fredonia is wealthier and almost entirely white, Dunkirk is poor, diverse, and riddled with problems. Fredonia kids typically binge drink and, “get away with whatever they want,” Dunkirk kids typically smoke weed and, “get away with whatever they can.”
In the early days of Dunkirk’s settlement, Blacks and Whites and Puerto Ricans and Polish lived separately in the wards that still exist, and corner stores flourished, but of course, those are gone now. The railroad was big and downtown was thriving, it was truly thought that Dunkirk would be as important a port city as Buffalo, but then “urban renewal” came and destroyed what was there but didn’t replace it with anything else. Racial tensions that have always been there still remain, but obviously not in the same shape or form or volatility as it once did. A legacy is a legacy and economic patterns and hushed jokes between neighbors and club memberships at legions, the number and placement of military recruitment offices will show what otherwise prefers to be denied.
There is a new plan to encourage tourism by advertising our lakeside benefits and optimism is in the air–there was even a PBS video about the area that featured a short piece about the changing dynamics of Dunkirk’s port, and I certainly don’t want to discourage hope and progress, growth, opportunity, etc. I just worry that it’s sinister and that tourism will corrupt what’s good about the place–crowd it, novelty it up, make it in to some horribly cheerful mockery of it’s former self, wholly unrecognizable, with the real money never reaching the people who need it or improving the quality of their everyday lives anyway…and that’s horribly, terribly, awfully revealing of an ugly cynical problem I have to work out—in therapy–if the county receptionist would ever call me back.
My geology professor showed me an armoured fish fossil he found in the Devonian era Dunkirk shale, and from the window of Demetri’s restaurant, you can peer out to the approximate point where there was once one of the great Mass Extinctions! It helps keep things in perspective while you wait for your baklava.
The best way I can figure to tell you about this place is through allegory and anecdote, from the people I have known or come across while I have meditated on this assignment so intensely. Let us start with the neighbors.
Creepy Mike, as he is affectionately referred to, by me when a safe distance away from him, is a man that captured my attention from day one. Creepy Mike finds his way into many of my correspondences, he is familiar to anyone who knows me well. Creepy Mike is a truck driver who is built like a man that is attractive in that way that strangely gets him 6 ex wives and 12 illegitimate children. He is built like a cowboy, he would like to think. He dresses like one, except that neon green construction worker shirt I think he stole off someone he must have killed while “on the road.” The thing about Creepy Mike is that he is TOO NICE, and CHARMING, and he laughs weird, and he comes over and offers to help, and he LIKES MY PARENTS, which is IMPOSSIBLE. He has a weird hair problem that he hides under a perpetual baseball hat. His wife and him were supposed to get married but there was a disagreement about beer. The wedding was canceled. Then they got married by a justice of the peace on their back deck.
Our other neighbor was found in the pool by his wife after she heard a weird sound, he’d tripped, hit his head, knocked himself unconscious and almost drowned–he is an alcoholic but he is doing okay.
Our other neighbor, a business professional, has a beautiful house, makes his kids get up an extra hour early to go to private Catholic school, he is building meticulously a tiny model version of his barn (inside his barn) and a tiny model version of their house to scale, and one night I, Gladys Kravitz, heard him telling my dad how much pot he smokes, and the “one-hitter” he was bringing with he and his wife on their trip to Vermont. All this time I thought I lived in Mayberry, all along it was Babylon!
The mechanics— I drive a 1994 Dodge Spirit, it’s always breaking down. Normally I took it to Ellman’s in Dunkirk but due to a crush on a stout alcoholic poet professor (who imitates the sounds of birds) and his fervent endorsement of the self-proclaimed pollock, Richard, I tried Richard. All three of us are relevant characters in this place, we’re part of it, we corrupt and enhance it as constantly as the weather. Me, my crush, and the pollock. A cat with no tail wandered in his “office,” (which was plastered with photographs–of dead deer, of his woodland property, and of vegetables he and his wife had grown, arranged in the shape of a human). Richard is a huge man in a mechanics one-piece suit and he was not pleased about the cat.
He took a black stiff broom and went crashing out of sight
I used to drive 70 miles a night to deliver newspapers around this place. I would start at around two in the morning and end at around six or seven. The man who taught me the route was the Circulation Dept. Supervisor. and he also worked on a dairy farm that I remember had been in his family for at least two generations. He had a rough car and I remember it had a baby seat in it he always had to move to the trunk before we could fit all the newspapers in the back. He hardly ever slept. You see the other adults at the headquarters, usually the Inserters are still there, they are at the bottom of the totem pole, they are objects of unspoken resentment, even though the machine might be broken, the Inserters are scorned. There was an extremely nice man who had a route close to mine, he looked like Ghandi and he wanted to start a NASA space camp or something, he had a degree in astronomy. There was a guy who seemed just like an off-shift rodeo clown after a few drinks from movies, I don’t know what it was about him, he was kind of scary. He had weird nicknames for everyone. There was a very seedy railroad circus feel to the whole performance. Like you might get shivved at any moment (bad news for the sweet guy who was also a hemophiliac!). That’s how adult rural newspaper delivery people are–just how you’d imagine, and I say that as someone who was one of them.
Anyway, my route was directly in the heat of the manhunt, right on his stomping grounds. It was so surreal to drive up to checkpoint after checkpoint, at a suspicious time of the night, in a criminally suspicious low-class car, when tensions were so high and everyone was so trigger-happy, and to actually have men with assault rifles approach me and guns trained on the trunk of my Spirit, and one night there were actually snipers in a ditch when I came up to a stop sign around 4 in the morning in that town I mentioned where my 104 year old aunt lives and there is no gas station. No other cars were out, just me in the dark at that stop sign, me and my sister at the stop sign and the snipers in the ditch. I made sure I came to a complete stop and very slowly turned without trying to seem like I noticed there being people in the ditch or move my head or make any sudden movement. I spent a lot of time thinking about the whole thing while I was driving. Wondering how people end up where they end up, and why people write editorials arguing whether or not he was becoming a folk hero and what it means that a restaurant called Grandma’s Kitchen made “Bucky Burgers” that you order “to go.” My grandma kept saying she will always love the underdog no matter what and that “he didn’t mean for anyone to die,” she’s a regular Walt Whitman. People on the Internet, because of the convenience of anonymity, were nastier than the community editorials and what came out was that people from the urban areas were saying that this area was full of crazy, white trash, hicks, like “Bucky,” and that it was disgusting that we would be so anti-trooper (regardless of all evidence that tragedy may have been directly intensified by State-level mismanagement, arrogance, and uncooperative attitudes towards local law enforcement).
Through a coincidence, a woman I met from college had me over at her house one night, also at her house was a troubled young man who mentioned Ralph Phillips, and it was discovered that they had been in the Mayville prison together for a short time, here is a transcript of the one letter written to the troubled young man that I met:
Hello David December 7 [2006/ following surrender]
Thank you for writing– you guys keep up the spirit!
Things may take a turn here in a few days depending upon what some officials say.
You enjoyed the “Guilty as Hell.” I knew folks would. : )
Hopefully people realize my guilty pleas do not truly reflect my guilt– it’s all window dressing.
I pled guilty to help my daughter and her mom.
Unfortunately things may change here, they are trying to do some foul shit again and as always–I’ve found out about it.
No, sorry, didn’t know your folks, that I recall.
Hey, Take Care.
Ralph B. Phillips
I don’t know what more to say about this except that in Stockton there are is no corner store or gas station but there is a park bench and a modest brick monument on the ground. Several of the names of my own relatives are carved on those red bricks. It’s very Spoon River Anthology. You have to picture it. There are these bricks in the ground, and like, one bench, at this stop light, the only one in town, at the former hotel, at the only restaurant, and these are memorial bricks and among them are the trooper Bucky shot and the Horton kid that a trooper shot accidentily while looking for Bucky. So that just goes to show you…how connected everything is and how strange.
Strange indeed, I will tell you about Halloween. I was walking home from my cousin’s apartment. I got stuck in the middle of downtown. My costume was just a pair of huge angel wings with real feathers and the only place I could sit that had a low enough backed seat so as not to crush the feathers, was the edge of the fountain in the park. And I was wearing various shades of blue, because I like Marlene Dietrich and I wasn’t trying very hard and I have issues. The place was swarming with college kids in various stages of drunkenness. It’s a college town and there are college bars, I understand that and I understand that it was Halloween, but the girls, and I don’t want to sound like one of those creepy moral-seething serial killers that lurks in the shadows, and it’s not like I am surprised by “sexy kitty/sexy nurse/sexy maid/sexy raggedy anne/sexy witch/sexy anything,” it’s just that it seemed like there was a new low in self-respect and a new low in the overall intelligence. I swear to God there were girls in HOOTERS costumes. This can’t be a good sign. I don’t know what it means for my place.
A guy dressed as Superman, with entourage, asked if I had another cigarette, I gave him one and a drunken guy in a toga kept saying, “she really is an angel!” While someone else grumbled, “shut up.” I was halfway home and there was still throngs of terrifying aliens between me. I had so naively thought that other college kids weren’t that different from me, but I’m not so sure anymore, and again I wish the county Mental Hygiene lady would call me back.
Part of the reason I think I’m so down is my car is dying, and I used to like to know I could go for a drive—because physically this is an incredible place. It’s overwhelming sometimes if you’re feeling sappy and the light is hitting things just right. I’m sure it’s like that for anyone, anywhere—but the grapebelt, not everyone has that. You have to be careful, certain rows are perfect angles for deer (I have never hit a living thing to my knowledge, not a single squirrel).
We just ate the last grapes last week and they were too mushy. My grandma is getting neurotic about her leaves and I can tell it’s going to be a long winter.
My uncle built their old yellow Labrador a special shelter out of plywood in their garage, to go over her bed, and apparently they’re going to put one of those chicken incubator lights in there. Lady is an old dog, she curls up with their calico cat every night but they’re worried about her because it’s her boniest winter. They live in the same brick house my dad was raised in. Originally, before they lived there, seances were preformed in the attic. They are a very Baptist family. My dad was raised very Baptist. He was the only one of five children that turned out an Agnostic.
I have my mother to thank for that.
My mother was raised without practicing religion. Her father was a second generation Italian (Catholic) but he wasn’t too religious, and her mother ended up becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, but that wasn’t until after a lot of tragedy left her no choice, like the Vietnam war and losing my grandpa, etc.
My sister works in Adult Protection Services, she is always working in social services in some capacity, and the social services in this place are always strained to the maximum.
It’s not easy here, it never was. It used to be much more agricultural and now most of us are heirs of the factory, dependents on the factory, and I think that might be one of the things you can see evident at the Chautauqua County Fair, one of the things that’s depressing. The dart holes on the outdated posters of Cindy Crawford at the carnie games, or her equivalent. The caged exotic animals under a tarp smelling like hay and crap. The barns at our particular fairgrounds used to hold POWs. Seriously.
You can get a tattoo right there if the spirit moves you, and why shouldn’t it? The fireworks going off after the last demolition derby. The wasps gathered around the lemonade spouts. A little piece of gravel in your shoe. Sugar waffles. Life.
————————————————————————————————————————-
Lindsay Morrison Morrison
28 November 2008
Menoukha Case/Exploring Place
Revision/Addendum
Chautauqua County and the Poorhouse in Light of MADNESS & CIVILIZATION
Michel Foucault’s book Madness & Civilization delves into the relationship of outcasts to the mainstream through history, illuminating the societal transformations that accompanied shifts in treatment. Foucault argues that the decline of leprosy called for a new scapegoat, a role that was filled by the mentally ill who previously were an accepted, recognized, familiar element of society. Houses of Confinement or workhouses lumped together the insane, the poor, and the criminal in an exile that is symbolically linked to leprosy and its halo of repentance and contagiousness.
Where once madness was looked upon in the open, with wary superstition that the insane were somehow touched with a special access to visions or in communication with the incomprehensible babble of supernatural truth–it became a spectacle attributed with guilt from immorality and rooted in the error of the individual’s animal spirits, the humors, the black bile of melancholics or the agitation of blood in maniacs. Hysteria and Hypochondria were understood to be two forms of the same disease, decided by the individual’s gender.
Finally it was decided that the insane should be kept separately and not mix with the criminal, this was the birth of the asylum and the knighting of medical physicians to their glorious center stage in the narrative of madness, possessing a paternal authority, doling out the latest treatments (be it cold, violent baths, the consumption of bitters, iron, soap, tartar, or simply observation).
It is the idea of Exiles that I want to translate in my studies of the Chautauqua County Poorhouse. It is one thing to glaze over history, to think of the Dewittville Poorhouse as the quaint, primitive solution to caring for the Unfortunate, and quite another thing to look under the thin veil of care and honestly evaluate the ideas that fostered specific treatment. Places do not exist in a vacuum; Dewittville’s Poorhouse was a local interpretation of the global sensibilities in force at the time. Foucault explains:
Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labor. Our philanthropy prefers to recognize the signs of a benevolence toward sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness [Foucault 46].
In my investigation of the Dewittville Poorhouse I discovered that two people bearing my last name lived a short time and died there, I have no reason to believe they were not my relatives–one of them was cited as poor, the other as insane.
Born in the early 1900s, I have a great-uncle Glenn who became schizophrenic in his twenties and although he lived with his parents until they died of old age, he visited often the nearby Gowanda Psychiatric Hospital whom administered to him ineffective shock treatments. After both parents had died, Glenn was moved to a group home environment but because of behavioral problems stemming from his transition into dementia and subsequent suicidal threats, he was banished to the nursing home wing of the Lake Shore General Hospital where the poor wait, usually mouths-agape, unconscious in wheelchairs lined up in the hallway, to die. It is hard not to see there are connections between poor, madness, and economics– visible and relevant to this day.
Back to my poorhouse research. What clues does it give us to the mindset that created it? How can we be sure this place is not a unique island operating by itself? One issue that was raised was that of comfort/discomfort and another was that of moral explanations for mental illness.
In my paper, the escaped slave who spent decades in our poorhouse was described as, “a comfortable Negro to have about,” which could mean a lot of things but primarily I think it speaks to the notion of what is threatening and what is instead preferable. It doesn’t “go without saying” that a Negro is comfortable to have about, but the note was made that This One was. If reassurance was required even in the records of the place of exile, what does that imply about the mainstream of society, the community? If this is not solid evidence of an attitude, it is at least demonstrative of the shadows of the contemporary system, whispers of greater meaning.
It would be short-sighted of me to condemn our poorhouse to a simple, sinister economical feature without coupling with it the understanding that industriousness is firmly rooted in religious principles–the idea that man came from the land and is assigned to work the land for his salvation, the feeling that through hard work and enterprise the individual both earns the right to exist and can be cured of the self-absorption of the mind. Our poorhouse doesn’t coincide identically with Foucault’s time line, which I think only illustrates that cultural lag can occur in a place, as a microcosm it is penetrated gradually by global innovations.
In my research of the Dewittville Poorhouse records, many of the notes talk about masturbation as one catalyst for insanity. Thus, morality and blame are linked with the reasons for mental illness. It is through the indulgence in wicked deeds that could lead an otherwise robust and functioning worker who helped his family at their store, to a handicapped outcast with no place to go but with the other unfortunate rejects. This bold conclusion demonstrates the lack of scientific understanding of mental illness at the time and the groping for a familiar framework to understand it (religious, moral), or if not to understand it, then to categorize and subdue the threatening power of Other.
Riddled throughout the notes of the poorhouse are subjective terms that apply moral weakness to the needy and controls the history of their want by controlling the interpretation of why they are in need–debauchery, licentiousness, idleness, idiocy, bastardy, a wanton mother.
I would like to connect to this paper my study of Chautauqua County as a whole place. I only have the intangible to describe the very palpable living vibrations in being here, none of this is certain nor exclusively exclusive. All I know is that this is a religious area, full of characters that value hard-work rooted in it’s agricultural past and the endless toil it necessitates. The lake-effect winters engender a tough pride and a community cohesion. Toughness and work, therefore, are key moral principles that have primacy here, now as in the past. Thus I think that it’s safe to assume weakness and idleness would be prescribed mandatory labor at the poorhouse, because nobody gets a free ride, it would be taken as obvious that those in need of charity should have to earn their keep.
The glaciers carved the yielding land and the shape defined by expanses that resisted, boulders are dragged through the vineyards as glacial till to be deposited out of the way–the till is composed of non-native rocks, stones that were dragged through here from the north. My own great great maternal ancestor was a French-Canadian that arrived as an abandoned infant with a note pinned to his onsie. Things are connected, it’s undeniable.
These days I go to the Chautauqua County Office of Mental Hygiene, a place that is obviously bursting at the seams with needy crazies, underfunded and understaffed, it’s not a hard place to fall through the cracks despite the best efforts of the people involved. And it’s funny, I use to tell that professor I had a crush on (who recommended Richard the mechanic), that I felt, “like a leper,” a connection that now seems it was formed in my mind by instinct or intuition to reality.
Works Cited
Barden, Virginia W., Lois Barris, and Norwood J. Barris. Chautauqua County Alms House and Asylum. Fredonia: Chautauqua County Genealogical Society, 1992.
Crannell, Linda. “Over The Hill To The Poor-House.” The Poorhouse Story. 2000. 3 Oct. 2008
Foucault, Michael. Madness & Civilization. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
one long sentence assignment (2007?)
I need to tell the world, in no uncertain terms, what I feel about it (though I use the term “world” I mean much more than the physical place, the life on or in it, and the atmosphere around it, but also everything in all directions–infinitely) and I hope you’ll excuse me but I have only the vibrations between tangible things to translate this intangible affection (affect-infection?)–and I am trying to avoid being too sappy (I’m always that or too critical) when I attempt to analyze this love that comes in awful pangs—those honeyed nerves stringed to a heart that is sickeningly caramelized for all of this (and so much more): six tiny ants on a peony bud, the starving blond grass under the kiddie pool, the first cigarette on an interstate drive, the Virgin Mary manifested in a sidewalk gum splotch, a teen mother giving birth in the potato-chip aisle, the haunting guttural music descending from the mountains (and the brave curiosities who people the South), recognizing a name on a library card, the woods with occasional strange furniture (stuffed chairs rotting to the springs), caterpillars in the one-twigged world we offer, a sea- horse doing it’s little love-dance (tail curled around some Japanese sea plant, eye level at the Aquarium), the soothing voice of a documentary narrator (concerned and thorough, explaining the problem), a jellyfish intricate and brainless (the beautiful ghost of identity crisis–when I finally lose touch I wouldn’t mind becoming a jellyfish), imagining an underground society that meets in empty old laundromats, old people who can’t sleep unless the TV’s on, convicts with frontal lobe damage and sad childhoods, meek girls with their four-poster bed and their horse calendars, the little cells of an orange slice, a burning sparkler so hot near the hand, the involuntary nestling of head into pillow, the mass of humanity silhouetted around you in the brighter shots of a movie, the polite muffling of coughs, my fifth grade teacher with lipstick on her teeth, the gravel in a skinned knee, a corn field at 4 AM (as seen through spread fingers, out the window at 35 MPH), a dignitary tripping on the corner of the carpet, doll parts in the hobby shop, two white horses standing back to back in the dark, fuzzy violets, children who will hold a funeral for a fallen robin’s egg or a mouse, the smell of a church basement (mildew and perfume), all of the foreigners I try to imagine in my mind–always in their prospective costumes (frozen in various stages of activity–scenes which I have fused from bits of history lessons and product advertisements), and people displaying all their crap on the lawn for a yard sale and other people coming to look at their crap in an exercise of sweet vulnerability (so to this list of Things About the World Which I Hope Are Being Permanently Recorded and Appreciated, I can now add: creepy knickknacks, slightly used cologne, treadmills, collections of commemorative plastic cups, skis, and mounted animal heads abandoned in the wake of pop culture’s home makeover shows)—you can see where I’m going with this.
