Forgotten patients and forgotten cemetery
Near the former Dixmont State Hospital are graves of 1,300 mental-health patients ignored by families.
PITTSBURGH - A Beaver County filmmaker wants to honor dozens of mental-health patients by cleaning up the overgrown cemetery were they were buried - some nearly 150 years ago - and putting up a memorial.
All but one of the 1,300 neglected graves, by the site of the former Dixmont State Hospital, are marked only by numbered stones. The patients were cast aside by their families when alive and never reclaimed in death.
While researching the state hospital for a Dixmont documentary she debuted last year, Kate Guerriero became determined to clean up the cemetery.
"This has just bothered me from day one," Guerriero, 29, of Hopewell, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "They are people who had lives, and they're totally forgotten. It's like they're abandoned again."
Now Guerriero is looking for volunteers and donations of equipment, including wood-chippers and chain saws, for a cleanup set for May 26. Guerriero also wants to collect money for a memorial marker.
She has uncovered documents showing that the first person was buried in the cemetery May 26, 1863, and the last March 8, 1937.
Only one marker has a name engraved on it. Joseph Steffy, who died at 40 on June 1, 1881, may have been a Civil War veteran who was granted the honor of a headstone, Guerriero said.
Beryl Johnson of Moon Township worked in Dixmont's psychology department from 1970 until it closed in 1984. She said she believes at least two Confederate soldiers may have been buried in the cemetery after being brought north on prison trains and taken off in Pittsburgh due to illness.
The graves were given numbers so that the dead would not be identified as mental-health patients, Johnson said. In her records, she said, she found letters from families asking the hospital not to return the bodies when the patients died.
"What struck me about that was it was such a stigma to be mentally ill," Johnson said. "They did not want this family member to be brought back even though he was dead. . . . As far as they were concerned, he was gone."