Disability rights group tells history of State Hospital through ‘people, not patients’

The Babcock Building, once a distinctive fixture of the State Hospital for the Insane, on Tuesday, July 9, 2024. (Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)

COLUMBIA — In 1866, a cleft palate so severe he couldn’t speak landed Samuel Able, then around 10 or 11 years old, in what was then called the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum.

All that’s left of Able’s story now are doctors’ notes about his years spent confined with adult men at one of the nation’s first state-funded asylums for the mentally ill.

Doctors called Able “one of the most mischievous patients in the asylum” and noted that if “he had the power of speech he would hardly be regarded as insane,” according to patient records.

He died before the 1900s, though exactly when is unknown.

When disability rights group Able South Carolina started working on a project to uncover and tell the stories of people institutionalized at the sprawling campus along Bull Street, Able’s story stuck out to director Kimberly Tissot for his age and just how little is known about him.

“He was just a little boy, just not understood,” Tissot said.

His story was featured as part of a website highlighting experiences of the people institutionalized at the mental hospital from shortly after its opening in 1828 until its 1896 renaming to the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane.

Able was committed by his father — a Confederate captain from Lexington County — after his mother died. He’s the only child included among the narratives of first-generation immigrants, an enslaved man, and white and Black South Carolinians.

The nonprofit Able SC is trying to raise enough money to keep the project going, telling the personal histories of people at the S.C. State Hospital (“insane” was dropped in 1920) until its eventual closing in 2003. With possibly some state aid and other grants, Able SC hopes to also build a museum on Bull Street to preserve and share their stories.

Though the People, Not Patients website launched in January 2023, Able SC didn’t really start promoting it until recently.

In the last few months, more than a half dozen people have reached out to head researcher Katharine Allen asking for help finding more information about their relatives committed at the campus that became known simply as Bull Street.

Allen, who works for Historic Columbia, directs people to the public records available at the state Department of Archives and History .

The people

Both John Mathewes Flud and Anthony, whose last name is unknown, spent just a few months at the hospital before the Civil War, but their time there was very different.

Flud, a wealthy planter from Johns Island, received packages from his wife including fashionable clothes. Staff helped sew his name into his clothes to keep other patients from stealing them.

When Flud died at the hospital at age 34 in August 1832, a day or two after hitting his head on an iron banister, he was first buried in Columbia before being interred on Johns Island. His wife, Eliza, composed a lengthy inscription for his tomb, saying he suffered “under great bodily disease” from “a series of afflictions seldom occurring in the same mortal.”

Anthony , on the other hand, was sent to the institution in 1850 at age 50 on the dime of his enslaver, future state Supreme Court Justice Franklin J. Moses Sr. of Sumter.

His commitment came just over a year after the General Assembly passed a law allowing Black patients. He spent all his time confined in a wooden building in the courtyard to keep him separated from white patients.

After dying of convulsions, he was likely buried in a segregated section of Columbia’s pauper cemetery.

After flipping through hundreds of patient records at the state Department of Archives and History, Allen landed on Flud and Anthony as examples of the dichotomy of experiences at the institution.

“What is available for each person is completely different,” Allen said.

There are plenty of historical accounts of the mental facility. But most focus on the buildings, the agencies, the practices or the doctors, Allen said.

The original building , named after its renowned architect Robert Mills, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973. And the Babcock Building , completed in four phases from 1857-1885, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1981.

Able SC was interested in “just trying to bring some humanity back to the site,” Allen said.

The nonprofit wanted to know more about the people who lived there, including their families and treatment they received, Tissot said.

With a nearly $10,000 grant from the nonprofit South Carolina Humanities, the organization hired Historic Columbia to track down the records that survived.

“We really wanted to make sure that people really knew what Bull Street was all about,” Tissot said.

That proved to be challenging, Allen said.

A lot of records from the 1800s were destroyed over the years. What was left was handwritten and often sparse. She focused on people whose families she thought she could trace.

Her research identified about 30 of the nearly 8,000 people admitted to the then-S.C. Lunatic Asylum. The website tells the accounts of 11 of them — including a pair of sisters, and a mother and her adult son — admitted between 1830 and 1894.

SC could sell Bull Street buildings after agencies move. Would taxpayers benefit?

What happened to them creates a picture for people to better understand how the treatment of people with disabilities has changed, Tissot said.

Patients featured on the website were restrained, subjected to bloodletting and induced vomiting, and, in at least one case, locked in a dark room for a month.

State law creating the psychiatric hospital’s governing board referred to its purpose as treating “lunatics, idiots or epileptics.”

Much has changed. There is a far better understanding of disabilities of all kinds, along with more public support and resources, but some of the stigma remains, Tissot said.

“While this was a very long time ago, there are still very similar types of treatments and biases that people with disabilities are experiencing in South Carolina and, really, throughout the U.S.,” Tissot said.

Museum plans

Eventually, Able SC wants to build a museum detailing the history of disability rights in the state, beginning with the State Hospital.

The museum would be designed with accessibility in mind. The goal is to build it on Bull Street’s developing campus, near the iconic Babcock Building. The land and construction could cost up to $30 million and take six or seven years to complete, Tissot said.

The museum would include stories about people who stayed at the institution, as well as follow the history of people with disabilities outside of it.

“We’re really wanting to tell these stories because these individuals have never really had the respect that they really deserve,” Tissot said.

Being near the Babcock Building that became symbolic of the entire campus would allow the nonprofit to give more context on its history and the people who lived there, Tissot said. (The building itself has been transformed into luxury apartments.)

Many people know the lore of the site, but they might not know the history behind it or think about the people who lived there, Allen said.

“If you can give names and some type of context of their lives, I think it really helps people feel something different in that space,” Allen said.

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