COLUMBIA — In 1866, Samuel Able, then 10 or 11 years old, was admitted to what was then called the South Carolina Asylum with a cleft palate so severe that he could not speak.
All that remains of Abel’s story are his doctors’ notes about the years he spent locked up with adult men in one of the nation’s first state psychiatric hospitals.
According to patient records, 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 have been regarded as insane.”
He died sometime before the 1900s, but the exact date is unclear.
When disability rights group ABLE South Carolina began work on a project to unearth and tell the stories of people housed on the sprawling campus along Bull Street, Able’s story stood out to director Kimberly Tissot because of his age and how little was known about him.
“He was just a little boy and he wasn’t understood,” Tissot said.
His story was featured as part of a website featuring the experiences of people admitted to the asylum from its opening in 1828 until it was renamed the South Carolina State Asylum in 1896.
Able was interned by his father, a Confederate captain from Lexington County, after the death of his mother. He is the only child in the story of first-generation immigrants, slaves, and white and black South Carolina.
The nonprofit Able SC is trying to raise enough funds to continue its project of telling the personal histories of patients admitted to South Carolina State Hospital (“insanity” was abolished in 1920) until its closure in 2003. With state aid and other grants, Able SC also hopes to build a museum on Bull Street to preserve and share patients’ stories.
Although the “People, Not Patients” website launched in January 2023, Able SC didn’t actually start promoting it until recently.
Over the past few months, more than a half-dozen people have contacted lead researcher Katherine Allen, asking for help finding more information about relatives who were detained on the campus that has become known simply as Bull Street.
Allen, who works at Historic Columbia, guides people through public records held by the State Archives and History Department.
people
John Matthews Flood 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.
Mr. Flood, a wealthy plantation owner from Johns Island, received a package of fashionable clothes from his wife, and the staff helped him sew his name onto his clothes to prevent them from being stolen by other patients.
Fludd, who died at age 34 in August 1832, a day or two after hitting his head on an iron railing in the hospital, was buried first in Columbia and then on Johns Island. His wife, Eliza, carved a lengthy epitaph on his grave, noting that he had been “suffering from severe physical infirmities” with “a train of diseases not often occurring to the same man.”
Anthony, on the other hand, was sent to the facility in 1850 at age 50 on a dime by Franklin J. Moses Sr. of Sumter, a slave owner and future state Supreme Court justice.
His admission came just over a year after the state legislature had passed a law admitting black patients, and he spent his time confined to a wooden building in the courtyard to keep him separate from white patients.
He died of convulsions and was supposedly buried in a secluded section of Colombia’s pauper cemetery.
After sifting through hundreds of patient records at the State Archives and Historical Bureau, Allen came up with Flood and Anthony as examples of the dichotomous experiences at the facility.
“What’s available to each person is completely different,” Allen said.
The Department of Health and Environmental Control offices at 2100 Bull Street on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. The front portion of the building pictured is the state’s first hospital for the mentally ill, which opened in 1828. (Abraham Kenmore/SC Daily Gazette)
There’s a lot of historical documentation about psychiatric hospitals, but most of it focuses on the buildings, institutions, practices and doctors, Allen said.
The original building, named for noted architect Robert Mills, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973, and the Babcock Building, completed in four phases between 1857 and 1885, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1981.
Able SC was interested in “bringing some humanity back to this place,” Allen said.
Tissot said the nonprofit wanted to learn more about the people who lived there, their families and the care they received.
The group received a grant of about $10,000 from the nonprofit South Carolina Humanities Association and asked Historic Columbia to track down the surviving records.
“We really wanted people to know what Bull Street is all about,” Tissot said.
That proved difficult, Allen said.
Many of the records from the 1800s were destroyed over the years, and what remains are handwritten and often sparsely written, so she focused on people who might be able to retrace their family footsteps.
Her research has identified about 30 of the roughly 8,000 people who were admitted to South Carolina mental hospitals at the time, and the website features the stories of 11 people who were admitted between 1830 and 1894, including two sisters, a mother and her adult son.
SC could sell the Bull Street building after the agency moves in. Would taxpayers benefit?
Tissot said what happened to them paints a picture to help people better understand how the treatment of people with disabilities has changed.
Patients listed on the website had been restrained, forced to bleed, vomit and, in at least one case, locked in a dark room for a month.
The state law that established the board of directors of mental hospitals defined their purpose as the treatment of “intrinsic, imbeciles and epileptics.”
A lot has changed: there is much more understanding of disabilities of all kinds, and more public support and resources, but stigma remains, Tissot said.
“This is a long time ago, but very similar types of treatment and prejudice are still present in South Carolina, and indeed across the United States, that are experienced by people with disabilities,” Tissot said.
Museum planning
Eventually, Able SC hopes to build a museum detailing the history of disability rights in the state, starting with the state hospital.
The museum will be designed with accessibility in mind. The goal is to build it on a developing campus on Bull Street near the iconic Babcock Building. Land and construction could cost up to $30 million and take six to seven years to complete, Tissot said.
The museum will tell the stories of those who have stayed at the institution, but will also showcase the history of people with disabilities outside of institutions.
“We want to tell these stories because these people have never really received the respect they deserve,” Tissot said.
Being located near the campus-wide iconic Babcock Building (which is being converted into luxury apartments) will allow the nonprofit to provide more context about the building’s history and the people who lived there, Tissot said.
Allen said many people know the legend of the place, but may not know the history behind it or think about the people who lived there.
“I think being able to give people their names and the context of their lives really helps them feel something different in the space,” Allen said.
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