Last part of asylum to be destroyed
MONROE - Green County will be demolishing the last portion of the former Green County Asylum for the Chronic Insane as it moves ahead with a plan to build a new government services building in the next few years.
The building, (pictured at left) which is about 130 years old, is no longer practical to house government offices, county officials say.
Likewise, a portion of the complex constructed in the 1960s (pitctured at right) is also inefficient and will be torn down.
The new government services building will be built to the west of the driveway leading into the Pleasant View complex from Wisconsin 81. The board approved $18 million funding for the project in June.
The Pleasant View Nursing Home building is not affected by the building plan.
- Times staff
MONROE - Nestled among the buildings of the Pleasant View complex off of Wisconsin 81 north of Monroe are the last remains of one of the city's most historic buildings.
Once known as the Green County Asylum for the Chronic Insane, and known at various points as the Green County Mental Hospital or simply the Poor Farm, the complex has all but been replaced by more modern buildings - but the original building remains, currently housing the offices of Green County Human Services.
Originally built in 1882 for $6,390, the Green County Asylum originally was a single-building facility with capacity for 40 patients. Despite the institution's name, the facility served as the home for the county's poor and elderly as well. The asylum became colloquially known as the Poor Farm and would expand to several buildings and hundreds of acres of fields.
Press coverage from the period paint the facility as an opportunity to provide the county's needy a modicum of self-sufficiency - to "enjoy the fruits of honest labor," as one clipping read. Another clipping from 1930 described the patients working on the facility's 400-acre farm - patients would work in the fields, raising the corn and wheat used to feed them.
Roger Goepfert of Monroe, who began working at the facility as an accountant in 1968, said patients had, at various points, a chicken farm with 1,800 hens, orchards, a bottling facility, a bakery, a dairy, a cannery and laundry, all of which were staffed by residents.
"It was like a little town," Goepfert said. "People treated the patients with respect."
The buildings were connected by a system of tunnels, that have since been sealed, which patients and staff would use in foul weather, Goepfert said.
Another news clipping from the early 20th Century said patients would see movies twice a month and even had their own newspaper, The Green Parrot, which wrote about schedules of events, patient birthdays and even local news.
Despite the size of the institution, the Poor Farm never housed more than about 300 inmates. "Wisconsin is the only state or county where people mentally afflicted are distributed in small units," wrote Dan Markham for the Brodhead Register in 1930. At that time, the facility served little more than 100.
Goepfert remembered about 300 patients at the hospital when he began working there; many of them from outside Green County. Patients would be sent from surrounding areas as other counties began closing their own mental health facilities.
The Green County Mental Hospital's status as a hub for other counties' mentally ill ended in the 1970s, when a federal court found the state's civil commitment statute unconstitutional after a woman was wrongfully detained without hearings or trial on a diagnosis of schizophrenia. This reform eventually led to the 1976 Mental Health Act, which strongly tightened the standards of mental illness required for commitment.
Because of these reforms, sufferers of mental illness would no longer necessarily have to be committed to institutions such as the asylum and the influx of patients from other counties slowed.
"Some of the patients went back to their counties of residence," Goepfert said. "The others were housed in an intermediate care facility, and some arrived at halfway houses."
In any case, by 1969, much of the original institution had been replaced by the more modern Pleasant View Nursing Home, which took in many of the aging patients of the Mental Hospital and retained the facility's records.
These records served to preserve one of the last traces of the old Poor Farm. North of the Pleasant View complex lies a forgotten cemetery. Thirty-nine graves marked only with Roman numerals lie there, marking the final resting places of some of the hospital's patients.
Green County Clerk Mike Doyle said he was able to identify each of the interred patients and their date of death. The earliest person buried died on Sept. 23, 1934, while the last died May 5, 1950.
"It wasn't difficult," Doyle said. "The nursing home had complete records."
Doyle is currently working on raising money to erect a monument at the cemetery with names and dates of those interred.
"I thought it was inappropriate for them to be buried without a marker," Doyle said. "If I can't raise the money, then I guess I'll pay for it myself."
When the monument is finished - hopefully in 2017, Doyle said - it will become one of the sole remaining markers of more than a century of Green County's most vulnerable people.
Once known as the Green County Asylum for the Chronic Insane, and known at various points as the Green County Mental Hospital or simply the Poor Farm, the complex has all but been replaced by more modern buildings - but the original building remains, currently housing the offices of Green County Human Services.
Originally built in 1882 for $6,390, the Green County Asylum originally was a single-building facility with capacity for 40 patients. Despite the institution's name, the facility served as the home for the county's poor and elderly as well. The asylum became colloquially known as the Poor Farm and would expand to several buildings and hundreds of acres of fields.
Press coverage from the period paint the facility as an opportunity to provide the county's needy a modicum of self-sufficiency - to "enjoy the fruits of honest labor," as one clipping read. Another clipping from 1930 described the patients working on the facility's 400-acre farm - patients would work in the fields, raising the corn and wheat used to feed them.
Roger Goepfert of Monroe, who began working at the facility as an accountant in 1968, said patients had, at various points, a chicken farm with 1,800 hens, orchards, a bottling facility, a bakery, a dairy, a cannery and laundry, all of which were staffed by residents.
"It was like a little town," Goepfert said. "People treated the patients with respect."
The buildings were connected by a system of tunnels, that have since been sealed, which patients and staff would use in foul weather, Goepfert said.
Another news clipping from the early 20th Century said patients would see movies twice a month and even had their own newspaper, The Green Parrot, which wrote about schedules of events, patient birthdays and even local news.
Despite the size of the institution, the Poor Farm never housed more than about 300 inmates. "Wisconsin is the only state or county where people mentally afflicted are distributed in small units," wrote Dan Markham for the Brodhead Register in 1930. At that time, the facility served little more than 100.
Goepfert remembered about 300 patients at the hospital when he began working there; many of them from outside Green County. Patients would be sent from surrounding areas as other counties began closing their own mental health facilities.
The Green County Mental Hospital's status as a hub for other counties' mentally ill ended in the 1970s, when a federal court found the state's civil commitment statute unconstitutional after a woman was wrongfully detained without hearings or trial on a diagnosis of schizophrenia. This reform eventually led to the 1976 Mental Health Act, which strongly tightened the standards of mental illness required for commitment.
Because of these reforms, sufferers of mental illness would no longer necessarily have to be committed to institutions such as the asylum and the influx of patients from other counties slowed.
"Some of the patients went back to their counties of residence," Goepfert said. "The others were housed in an intermediate care facility, and some arrived at halfway houses."
In any case, by 1969, much of the original institution had been replaced by the more modern Pleasant View Nursing Home, which took in many of the aging patients of the Mental Hospital and retained the facility's records.
These records served to preserve one of the last traces of the old Poor Farm. North of the Pleasant View complex lies a forgotten cemetery. Thirty-nine graves marked only with Roman numerals lie there, marking the final resting places of some of the hospital's patients.
Green County Clerk Mike Doyle said he was able to identify each of the interred patients and their date of death. The earliest person buried died on Sept. 23, 1934, while the last died May 5, 1950.
"It wasn't difficult," Doyle said. "The nursing home had complete records."
Doyle is currently working on raising money to erect a monument at the cemetery with names and dates of those interred.
"I thought it was inappropriate for them to be buried without a marker," Doyle said. "If I can't raise the money, then I guess I'll pay for it myself."
When the monument is finished - hopefully in 2017, Doyle said - it will become one of the sole remaining markers of more than a century of Green County's most vulnerable people.