Museum for MHI opening on grounds of Correctional Facility in Mt. Pleasant

By Grace King, Mt. Pleasant News

Footsteps echo down the hallway of the former Mental Health Institute, empty after closing their doors in 2015. While the history of the 150-year institute was scattered among rooms and closets, now it is confined to one corner of the building, taking visitors through time as it transitioned from an Asylum for the Insane to the sorely missed institute today.

The building of the former institute, which sits on the grounds of the Mt. Pleasant Correctional Facility, is being used as a museum to honor its history. The MHI Museum will host its debut opening on Friday, Aug. 24, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and will be open every other Friday. It is free to the public.

The museum was the idea and creation of Correctional Facility plant operations manager Jeremy Howk. What started as moving around boxes became something bigger after Howk took a trip to the Mental Health Institute in Independence and saw their three-floor museum.

?It?s hard for us that the Mental Health Institute did close, so we need to keep a piece of that history because it?s critical,? said Barb Wheeler, Associate Warden of Administration at the Correctional Facility.

The institute?s first patient arrived on Feb. 27, 1861. It was the first hospital in Iowa for mental health and possibly the first one west of the Mississippi River. At its peak, the Mental Health Institute, known by many names over the years, was a city in and of itself with its own farm operations, cattle, fire department and morgue with 1,500 patients.

In those days, people were committed for life for anything from alcoholism to fighting with a spouse to ?hysteria.?

?The old medication they gave basically made patients zombies,? Wheeler said. ?They didn?t understand paranoia, schizophrenia, psychosis. They were frightened of the behavior and didn?t have the knowledge.?

The quantity of patients and grueling hours made it difficult to keep nursing staff. Nurses were required to live on the premises, only leaving for a few hours once a week during an afternoon.

The history of the early days of the MHI is well documented through photographs dating back to the 1880s to newspaper articles.

One documented event is the fire of 1936. It broke out in the kitchen. As the institute evacuated, the community began coming out in droves to see what was happening.

?They couldn?t keep track of 800 people,? said Howk. ?The community made a circle, a human chain, and grabbed hands. You?ll see it says 10 missing after hospital fire, but there actually wasn?t. There was one missing, but they found out she got out the day before by a bedsheet through the window.?

When the prison moved to Mt. Pleasant for overflow inmates in the 1970s, they joined the MHI campus, living in the building where the MHI Museum currently sits. It was a joint campus for the Department of Human Services and the Department of Corrections.

Although the community was wary of the correctional facility, the inmates proved useful to maintaining the grounds of the institute. There were plenty of maintenance jobs for defenders and plumbing and electrical work for them to learn trades.

?The prison really helped maintain this building when DHS had short funds,? Wheeler said, adding that overall the budget for the institute was very small.

As the prison grew and the patients at MHI diminished, the correctional facility and institute switched buildings in the 1980s. Where inmates are now housed was the original MHI. While the two entities were on the same campus, Wheeler said they coexisted in a very positive manner.

While there were only a dozen patients at MHI when they closed in 2015, the loss of services in Mt. Pleasant is deeply felt three years later.

?It?s far-reaching,? Wheeler said. ?Every hospital in the area has people come in on 72-hour holds where there?s no place for them to immediately go. The inpatient hospitals are full up.?

Items at the museum include a makeshift doctors? office complete with a dentistry chair, a straitjacket and an electric shock therapy machine from the 1980s. On the other side of the room sits a safe from the Civil War era.

The heavy metal box was found on the other end of the building. It took five inmates to push the safe to its location now. Once there, Howk had to figure out how to get it open.

?You?re in a prison. You?re bound to find a safe-cracker,? Howk said in good humor. And sure enough, one of the inmates took a crack at it and had it open in just a few seconds. ?We were hoping to find a bunch of confederate money in there. There was nothing,? he said.

The former MHI building is on the right of the grounds of the correctional facility. Howk is planning on having signs drawn up to direct museum visitors to the right location. The grand opening is Friday, Aug. 24.