On the 3rd of September, 1860, a 25-year-old woman named Rhoda Derry was admitted to the Adams County Almshouse, about three miles southwest of Coatsburg, Illinois. She would not leave for 44 years. Her father had first taken her to the state hospital for the insane at Jacksonville in 1856, but she was discharged two years later. That was not cruelty, it was policy.
Under state law, any patient who had not improved within two years was classed as incurable and sent home, which in practice meant the state stopped paying for her. So she went to the poorhouse, where a report to the Illinois General Assembly in 1881 counted 101 inmates, 36 of them listed as insane paupers, with no physician among them. What happened to her there is on record because the man who eventually took her out wrote it down. George Zeller described a basket of straw tended only by other patients, her limbs drawing up until her knees nearly touched her chin, then the muscles wasting until she could not move her legs or hips at all.
The basket was later replaced by a square wooden box set over her with holes cut in the floor so waste dropped into a pan beneath. Mice nested beside her. She tore out her own eyes with her fingernails and beat out her front teeth with her fists. The 1870 census taker wrote two words next to her name: Blind.
Insane. By then, Illinois had already decided to build something new. In the session of 1895, the General Assembly authorized the Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane and appropriated $65,000 to buy land and raise buildings for 200 patients. The commission chose Bartonville, outside Peoria, coal country where men had been digging beneath those hills for decades.
The architects, Reeves and Bailey, designed it on the Kirkbride plan, one enormous limestone structure with long wings stepping back from a central administration block, the entire population under one roof. It was finished in 1897. It was never used. Two state documents explain why, and they do not agree.
One records that the buildings were found to stand on ground undermined by coal excavation and that removal to a different site was undertaken in 1898. The other, the hospital’s own 25th anniversary history, says nothing about mines, calling the building a facsimile of a feudal castle that had fallen out of step with modern thinking about the care of the insane. One says the ground failed. One says the idea failed.
Both are official. What replaced the castle was its opposite. Instead of one building, 33 cottages spread across 215 acres, with a store, a power station, a bakery, a farm, and a block holding the laundry and kitchen. The Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane opened on the 10th of February, 1902.
One hundred patients arrived by rail that day. By April, there were more than 634, already triple the design capacity in eight weeks. The man who took charge on the 2nd of November, 1902, was Dr. George Anthony Zeller.
And Zeller did not believe there was any such thing as an incurable person. In 1905, Zeller did something that made him briefly notorious among his own profession. He ordered every iron bar and every mechanical restraint removed from every building on the hill. No barred windows, no locked wards, no straps, no cribs, no chairs.
He also required female attendants on all wards. This was the doctrine of non-restraint, and in practice it meant a patient could walk out of a building and stand in the open air without asking anyone. The bars themselves did not go to scrap. Zeller had the iron grates reforged into cages and built a zoo on the hospital grounds.
Deer, bears, wolves. The metal that had caged the people now caged the animals, and the people were free to walk over and look at it. In 1906, he opened a training school for nurses. Later, there were films for patients on Friday nights and dances on Saturdays.
When Barnum and Bailey came through Central Illinois in the 1940s, the circus set up on hospital ground. But no published floor plan survives. No ward dimensions, no daily schedule, no discipline ledger, no punishment count, no staffing table. For an institution this heavily mythologized, almost nothing about how a day actually ran remains in public hands.
What does remain is one man’s method of finding out. Zeller left the hospital in 1913 and came back roughly eight years later, and what he found appalled him. So he checked himself in. He slept on a different ward each night as a patient, and the staff did not know he was there.
When he was finished, he ordered every employee on the payroll to do the same. His obituary in 1938 put his position in six words: They were not criminals, they were sick. The overcrowding only worsened. By the 25th anniversary in February 1927, the resident population was 2,650, and 13,510 people had passed through the institution in a quarter of a century.
That is a new human being arriving roughly every sixteen hours, day and night, without a break. The peak came in the 1950s, 2,800 patients against a design capacity of 200. What had been 33 cottages became 63 buildings. Then it reversed.
Chlorpromazine reached American hospitals in 1954, and the Federal Community Mental Health Act followed in 1963. The census fell. By 1972, there were 600 patients left on a campus built out to 63 buildings. But on the way down, the staffing collapsed.
Where the hospital had once run one nurse for every two patients, funding cuts pushed it to one nurse for 60. Employees pleaded for money and permission to hire. The pleas ran for years. There is no execution chamber in this story.
No signature procedure, no branded apparatus. What killed people at Peoria State Hospital was food, air, and policy. By 1906, four years after opening, the leading cause of death was tuberculosis. Zeller’s response was tent colonies, patients moved outdoors under canvas to separate the infected.
A purpose-built tuberculosis hospital, named Pollak Hospital, did not arrive until 1949, forty-three years after the disease became the hospital’s leading killer. The second killer was preventable, but nobody knew it. On the 7th of August, 1909, a pellagra outbreak began. Over the next three years, it sickened more than 500 patients and killed roughly 150.
Pellagra is a niacin deficiency, a disease of diet, but in 1909 no one understood that, and America was in the middle of an epidemic that would eventually reach something like three million cases and one hundred thousand deaths between 1906 and 1940. At Peoria State Hospital, tuberculosis ranked first among causes of death. Pellagra ranked second. One hundred and fifty people killed by what the state was feeding them.
In the 1930s, a syphilis outbreak was treated by deliberately infecting patients with malaria to induce a fever high enough to kill the infection. How many died of the treatment is not recorded. Zeller had banned the Utica Crib, a coffin-sized wooden box with a hinged lid, in 1905. On the 1st of December, 1913, he was replaced as superintendent by Dr.
Ralph T. Hinton. Within a year, according to a single institutional timeline, Hinton had ordered the bars and restraints put back on the buildings and into the wards. It took eleven years to strip the hardware out.
It took about twelve months to screw it back on. Zeller served twice, from November 1902 to December 1913, and again from 1921 until the 18th of March, 1935. In between, he ran Alton State Hospital. He went before the legislature and demanded the word “incurable” be struck from the name of his own hospital, and he got it.
But the state kept sending him the people it had already given up on. He retired in 1935 and was given an apartment inside the administration building, the Bowen Building. He died there on the 29th of June, 1938, aged 79. One person got out of the box, and the record of what followed is unusually complete.
Zeller learned about Rhoda Derry from the state board reports and sent a directive to the Adams County Almshouse: send her along. She arrived in September 1904. She was bathed and put into a bed, which she had not had since 1860. She was blind, could barely speak, and could not move her legs.
Zeller wrote that the nurses never had her out of their sight for a moment, and not one of them ever complained about the time she took. She lived twenty-five more months and died on the 9th of October, 1906, one day short of her 72nd birthday. The recorded cause was general paralysis of the insane. She was buried under a plain cement marker, number 217.
The most famous patient ever held there has no name at all. He arrived unable to speak coherently or write, and when the clerk of the court needed something for the commitment papers, he wrote down the man’s trade: bookbinder. The staff called him Old Book. He was assigned to the burial corps and wept at every funeral he helped dig.
He died in October 1910. Decades later, in 2006, a man named Bill Turner, who had worked at the hospital as an activity therapist from 1962 until it closed, bought him a headstone. In the third and fourth cemeteries, there is a grave attributed to Emily Belcher, allegedly the last surviving descendant of Sir Francis Drake. The record does not support this.
Someone told that story about a patient in an Illinois asylum, and it stuck to her grave. Peoria State Hospital ended not with a riot, a fire, or an exposé, but with a document about three people. In 1972, the Illinois General Assembly’s Legislative Investigating Commission produced a report titled “Three Patient Deaths at Peoria State Hospital. ” The catalog record at the Illinois State Library confirms it exists, and that is as far as the public record goes.
The state announced the closure of the hospital the same year. The doors shut in 1973. The remaining 600 patients were dispersed to regional facilities, nursing homes, families, outpatient programs, and some to the successor facility named after Zeller. What happened to them individually was never comprehensively tracked.
There is no follow-up study, no state accounting of outcomes for the last 600 people to leave that hill. No indictment followed the deaths. No named defendant, no sentence, no compensation. Since 1973, the patient files have been sealed, and Illinois will not release the names or birth and death dates attached to the graves.
Genealogists and local historians have identified more than 1,500 of them by other means. The rest are numbers. The state committed them, buried them, numbered the graves, and then sealed the list of who is in them, citing privacy as the reason. More than 4,000 people lie in four cemeteries in the woods behind the industrial lots, most under a stone carrying a number and nothing else.
Grave 217 has a name on it because a family put one there eighty years late. It reads: “They built this place so that no other human would suffer as she did. ” More than 4,000 others are still waiting for that sentence.