Colorado locked up middle-aged women for “lunacy,” old jail ledger reveals  (2024)

GOLDEN — The leather-bound ledger smells of tobacco and dust, each page listing the names of people booked into the Jefferson County Jail more than 100 years ago.

The men in the ledger, identified in old-timey cursive as immigrants, Native Americans and miners, were mostly booked for crimes typical in Golden’s mining heyday — drunkenness, bootlegging, fighting and murder.

The most common charge for women, however, was lunacy.

Of the 280 charges against women listed in the book, 74 are for “lunacy” or “insanity.” And of those women, at least 31 were sent from jail via train to what was then called the Insane Asylum at Pueblo. That’s 26% of all charges against women.

The Golden History Museum, a collection of dinosaur fossils and mining-era artifacts along Clear Creek, first used the ledger to investigate a 1879 lynching long part of town lore. Two men who murdered a well-liked Golden citizen and stole his wagon were pulled from jail by an angry mob and hung from a trestle bridge.

But as museum curator Stephanie Gilmore and program assistant Bianca Barriskill turned the giant pages of the 1878-1929 ledger, some stained with ink blotches or coffee, what jumped out at them was the number of times women were locked up for being “insane.”

The discovery set Barriskill on a monthslong exploration that included three trips to the old mental hospital in Pueblo, where she read logs listing what the women were wearing when they arrived, who dropped them off and whether anyone ever visited them again. The rich women arrived with silk dresses; the poor ones, muslin.

What Barriskill’s research uncovered was a sad tale of Colorado women — typically middle-aged — who were committed to the asylum by their husbands and sometimes never visited again. Death certificates and asylum records show many women lived there until their deaths.

The average age of the women charged with insanity in the jail ledger, Barriskill found, was 40.

That’s right about the time perimenopausal symptoms might begin, Barriskill could not help but speculate about.

“Why is it that the majority of the women who were institutionalized for insanity were in their post-childbearing years and in that post-menopausal arc?” Barriskill asked. Were their husbands and male doctors so clueless about the hormonal effects of menopause that they mistook them for mental illness? When wives could no longer have children, were they discarded by their husbands?

“I couldn’t make that claim, nor should I,” Barriskill said, though she does wonder.

It’s worth noting that records from the day show juries — not husbands — made the final determination about sending someone to the asylum.

There are 4,300 people listed in the 175-page ledger, and 93% of them —4,000 people — were men, according to the Golden History Museum’s count, which involved deciphering the cursive in the old book and entering the information into a spreadsheet. Museum workers have found just 72 men who were booked for insanity or lunacy, though they are still counting the final 10 years of the 50-year ledger.

The museum bought the ledger in 1999 from the daughter of former Jefferson County Sheriff Arthur Wermuth, paying $2,500. Wermuth apparently took the log book as a memento in 1958, some time after it had been placed in storage in the basem*nt of the sheriff’s office. His daughter had wrapped it in a pillowcase.

Most of the women in the ledger have been lost to history, identified by their husband’s last names and listed as “housewife.” But Barriskill did help lift one from obscurity.

As it turned out, her relatives in the Pacific Northwest were trying to do the same thing.

Diagnosed with insanity, and syphilis

At age 17, German immigrant Anna Marie Simmendinger, who was called Mary for most of her life, arrived in the United States by boat. She married a fellow German immigrant named Gustave Schneller, and the couple settled first in Pennsylvania, and then in Golden, where Gustave operated a bar called the Goosetown Tavern.

They were married for about two decades and had two sons. Then, when Mary was in her early 40s, she was picked up by Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies and booked under the charge of “insanity.” The jailhouse ledger shows she was sent to the asylum in Pueblo in 1907.

Mary died at the asylum 22 years later, in 1929. According to her death certificate, the cause of death was syphilis — so she either contracted it during her stay, a curious development, or she already had it when she arrived.

Mary’s great-granddaughter, Marilyn Roth, who had been trying to find out more about the relative who died before she was born when she heard from Barriskill at the Golden museum, has made up her mind about how Mary contracted the disease, which can cause mania, psychosis, personality changes and delirium.

In an interview with The Sun, Roth, 91, said she thinks Gustave was “having fun at the bar” he owned and contracted syphilis, which he gave to Mary, who was a good Lutheran woman and likely not a cheating kind of wife.

Mary and Gustave divorced in 1906, according to records Roth and her daughter found during their research. Mary was dropped off around that same time at the Jefferson County “poor farm,” a shelter for people who were destitute, according to the museum’s research.

“She kept wandering away from this poor house and she wasn’t able to get home,” said Roth’s daughter, Dayna Catto, the great-great-granddaughter of Mary.

The museum’s Barriskill found a newspaper clipping that described how Mary fled the poor farm in her nightgown and slippers, trying to find her way home. “The woman seems to be harmless, but the jury concluded it would be safer to have her sent to the asylum,” the Rocky Mountain News reported in 1907.

“They sent her to permanently live at the asylum for the remainder of her life,” Barriskill said.

Piecing together the records, it seems likely that after Mary fled the poor farm, she was picked up by the Jefferson County sheriff, booked into the jail, and then sent to Pueblo on the train.

She never had any visitors — not even her husband or two grown sons, according to asylum visitor logs. Gustave, meanwhile, took another wife.

“It’s almost like she was a forgotten mother,” Catto said. “That’s why mom and I wouldn’t let her be forgotten. We thought, what a sad person in our family tree, that no one talked about. We want her story to be told. She was an innocent who came into the country and got lost in it.

“I can’t imagine what kind of life she lived.”

Mary’s son had a daughter around the time she was committed. Her relatives wonder if she even knew about her first grandchild. Another lingering question: Where is she buried?

From 6,000 mental hospital patients to 500

In Pueblo, Barriskill dove into medical records so old they were written on scraps of paper and included notes such as “appears dumb” or “drools out the side of the mouth” or “stares vacantly.”

Richard Guenther, a volunteer at the hospital museum, had also spent hours researching the people who lived at the asylum, which opened in 1879 in a two-story farmhouse. As the numbers of patients increased, the state mental hospital kept expanding, including opening a separate building just for women.

By the 1930s, the state began building a new campus — the modern-day grounds of the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Pueblo —north of the original. The original campus houses the volunteer-run museum, a trove of historical medical records, surgical logs and artifacts including hand-sewn straitjackets and wooden restraint chairs with leather straps and bars. There are razors, watches and jewelry that went unclaimed by the relatives of patients who died there.

At its height, in 1961, the hospital had more than 6,000 patients. Today, thanks to deinstitutionalization, it has about 500.

“The hospital got so big that it was kind of a city within itself,” Guenther said. Logs in the museum show that the asylum won awards for its dairy cows and grew tens of thousands of pounds of cabbage every year to feed its residents. They tally the number of calico dresses sewn by the female patients who wore them.

Many entries in the patient logs include “insane” and “syphilis,” Guenther said.

There were far fewer female patients than men, reflecting the demographics of Colorado at the time, Guenther said. But the women stand out in the records and photographs, especially in the geriatric ward. Perhaps they lived longer, Guenther said, but that data has never been analyzed. “A lot of the women would be here a long time,” he said, “and I think it became their home.”

One of the biggest scandals was when a female patient had a baby and the hospital never informed her relatives, Guenther said. The baby died at about two weeks old, and according to records, was the child of the female patient and a male patient who was assigned to do maintenance in the women’s living quarters.

On a single Saturday in 1908, 37 women were admitted in one day. Guenther was curious why, and found that the hospital had just opened a new cottage for female patients, so a train car filled with women arrived in Pueblo from Denver. Every Saturday for a month, the hospital received a train car of women, and by the end of the month, the new building was full.

Guenther wrote an article about his discovery for the local historical society’s Pueblo Lore, listing the names of the 37 patients. But one of the proof-readers insisted on replacing the women’s last names with initials. “What if that was someone’s grandma?” he recalled the proofreader asking.

It was a common reaction, one that Barriskill also encountered in her research. People often didn’t acknowledge relatives who had been committed to the asylum, even decades later.

For Roth and Catto, Mary was a missing branch in the family tree. No one spoke of her great-grandmother when Roth was a child. It was only as an adult that Roth learned Mary had gone to a mental hospital.

“Mary actually has someone who is looking for her,“ Catto said. “She is not forgotten.”