-IN REMEMBRANCE-
In recent weeks I have been trying to identify as many as possible those folk who passed through the wards of Spencer State Hospital, Roane Co., WV. Many of the patients spent years, most of their lives there in conditions we cannot imagine today. Thusfar hospital and death certificate records provide names for 391 of those persons who died at the "Second Hospital for the Insane" and were buried in the hospital's cemeteries. There are still hundreds of residents unaccounted for. By the end of 1941 records show that 9,165 persons had been a patient there; some for a few days, others for many years.
The hospital opened in 1893 when it received the first 54 patients ; it closed in June 1989.
The 1900 Census enumerated 426 patients.
The 1910 Census enumerated 495 inmates. {Term used in census]
The 1920 Census listed 635 inmates.
The 1930 Census listed 787 inmates.
and the 1940 Census listed 937 inmates.
Beginning in about 1922 there were hundred's more men & women who died there, not claimed by family, whose bodies were donated to science at the WV University, Med School, Morgantown, WV.
In an attempt to honor and remember all those who died at the Spencer State Hospital, I am posting death records to the Find-a-Grave Memorial website.
Special thanks to Judy Hildreth who compiled records for the Roane County Historical Society's Cemetery Book IV, and to Melissa Swisher, RCHS member, for beginning the posts to Find-a-Grave.
The institution owned burial ground was recorded in 1940 as having 7 marked graves and 750+ unmarked. Those seven were: Mary Dagostin, Elizabeth Ewing, R. P. Hanson, Amelia Huber, Medora J. Kendall, Antonio Petiti and William S. Riley.
When the hospital closed in 1989 their records and some of the patients became part of the Lakin Hospital in Mason Co., WV.
Linda Cottrell Liss, Member, Roane County Historical Society, Inc.