My Nebraska-born grandmother, born Mary Pattie, was a mystery to me. She was born at the end of the nineteenth-century, was a devout Methodist, and abstained from drinking. She was an expert typist and an excellent baker. She had attended family reunions with uncles who had fought in the Civil War on both sides. When the topic of not drinking came up, she occasionally mentioned that couple of her brothers drank. She didn’t use the word “alcoholic.”
Recently, after brief exchange with my 93-year-old father about his mother’s family, I started wondering about the drinking brothers. He thought both might have been cowboys and worked for the railroads.
I started to dig around and in doing so I learned a lot about my dad’s family but also about how much we don’t know about our own families. Much of what I learned about the two brothers was news to my father.
The family’s story tracks to the larger historical narrative of white people moving west, but also moving around in the west, in search of opportunity.[1] But also sometimes failing in that search.
Joseph Preston Pattie, the older of the two brothers, was born in 1882. He was the last of the Pattie children born in Kentucky. The family moved west to Nebraska the following year. As a young man he moved south to Kansas City, Kansas.[2] During this period, he worked as a fireman on the Santa Fe Railroad line and lived in a boarding house with two relatives.
His documentary trail is sparse, but he did make it into the Wellington Kansas paper in 1912.
A case of whisky, containing twenty-four pints of genuine Mell Run, which is described as the personal property of the Santa Fe Railway company, is missing from the joint station of the Rock Island and Santa Fe railroads at Peck. Whether someone mistook the joint station for a joint, and thought to pay for the liquor later, or just simply stole it, is a matter of dispute. John Mahoney, of the Santa Fe’s Wichita Force, charges Joseph Pattie of Herington, with having stolen the whiskey, in a warrant upon which Mr. Pattie was arrested Tuesday. Pattie is a fireman on the Santa Fe, running between here and Herington. He is said to have picked up the case of whiskey and taken it to Herington for future reference.[3]
Perhaps it was a slow news week, but the story also was featured in the two major dailies of Wichita. A few days later he resigned from the Santa Fe Railroad.[4]
By 1917 he was living in Arizona, once again employed by the Santa Fe Railroad as an engineer. [5] He had bad luck. Married sometime after 1917 to a woman named Dorothy, he was divorced by the time of his death from a coronary thrombosis in February 1940. By then he was living alone, at the age of 57, at the St. Michael’s Hotel in Prescott, Arizona, and was still working as an engineer for the Santa Fe railroad.[6]
Joseph’s younger brother, Lee Pattie, stayed closer to the family. He was the first Pattie child born in Nebraska. By 1900, at 16 years, he was living on his own as a ranch hand in Cloud Chief, Washita County, Oklahoma, where he boarded with owners of the ranch.[7] He had been a cowboy of some sort.
By 1910, Lee had moved to Caldwell, Kansas, joining most of the family, including my grandmother. Two years earlier he had married Jessie Hutson in nearby Wellington, Kansas.[8]
Small town newspapers in places like Caldwell functioned like pre-technology Facebook pages and reported on the residents’ most mundane and everyday activities. I was surprised how much detail one can learn by scanning these papers. Several stories reported on visits to town by Lee’s in-laws and their activities.[9] At some point, the couple moved to a nearby town and there were news reports of my grandmother occasionally visiting them.[10] Again, there was no privacy.
Most of the time, it seemed, the intrusive small-town press created a sense of community. You could practically find out what someone had eaten for breakfast. But like social media today, there was a dark side to the nosy news.
By 1916, Jessie had filed for divorce, and it made it into the newspaper. A judge granted the petition “on the grounds of extreme cruelty.”[11] Subsequently, she petitioned to return to her maiden name.[12] Of course, the documentary evidence is thin, but divorce was not common in that period. What was the nature of Lee’s “extreme cruelty?” What was going on?
What happened next to Lee offers a possible answer. Like his brother Joseph, Lee was required to register for the draft in 1917. Through Ancestry.com, I quickly found his draft card. The document is a basic piece of bureaucratic paperwork. Lee’s draft card, however, held a surprise.
His address listed was simply “Caldwell KS, Sumner County.” His “place of business or employment” was the Topeka State Hospital. But he was not an employee at this famous psychiatric hospital but a patient. Under medical conditions was listed, in brutal simplicity, “Insane.” The nearest relative listed was John Pattie, another older brother. All the men at Topeka State Hospital registered at the same time. I found hundreds of cards for male patients from that year.[13]
My father had never heard about an uncle being confined to the hospital. Naturally, I had a lot of questions about Lee.
Taking a stab in the dark, I decided to look in the U.S. Census.
In the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Census, Lee Pattie was a patient at the hospital. Like the draft cards, the census data for the hospital listed hundreds of wards of the state in page after page of lists. Given that he happened to be at the hospital for two successive censuses, I guess that he never left the hospital. He likely remained at the Topeka State Hospital until his death in 1932.
There are three ways to find out about an individual who had been confined to a psychiatric hospital. The first is to contact the state historical society to find out if their patient records are extant. In most states, probably all, you must be a relative of the individual in question. I wrote the Kansas Historical Society. Unfortunately, Lee Pattie’s patient records were on a microfilm that is no longer legible.
The second way is made possible by the role of small-town newspapers as exhaustive records of the inhabitants’ lives—and as busybodies that reported the intimate details of people’s lives. Local papers often listed when a resident had been confined to a hospital. In Lee’s case, his confinement did not follow any crime or newsworthy incident. Perhaps the family managed to keep the precipitating incident out of the papers. [14] However, as a matter of county bureaucracy, and because fees were paid for processing, his case appears simply as a name, the procedure, and the cost.
The third method is to review legal documents. Every person confined to a psychiatric hospital had to appear before a judge who, under the advice of two independent medical doctors, determined if the subject’s condition merited hospitalization. The Sumner County Courthouse sent me Lee’s Lunacy Warrant, the Affidavit of Lunacy, the Order for Hearing, and Notice for Members of Commission [doctors’ signatures] for Lee Pattie. The only family member who appears in the documents is another brother, Robert Pattie. No one in the family was willing or able to care for Lee Pattie.
Without Lee’s medical file, I had to reconstruct what life as a patient MIGHT have been like from published primary sources. And, from my familiarity with the historiography on psychiatry.
We can get some sense of what life was like from the hospital’s annual reports. Those reports do not sugar-coat the challenges. The report from the years 1916-1918 reveals that the hospital was overcrowded and understaffed. Much of the low staffing was attributed to the wartime draft that pulled lots of eligible employees away from hospital jobs. The report speculated that an aggravating factor in mental torment was poor oral hygiene. Unlike some doctors at the time, the Kansas hospital was careful not to suggest that rotten teeth and sepsis caused mental illness.[15] General paresis, tertiary syphilis, was on the rise. Lee Pattie was one of nine residents of Sumner County confined to the hospital during the two-year period. Like many hospitals of the day, the Kansas institution had a farm that helped feed the hospital.[16]
As happened in most public psychiatric hospitals, conditions deteriorated during the Great Depression. The annual report from 1932-1934 was grim and discussed the deterioration of the physical plant and massive overcrowding.[17] Not surprisingly, the hospital reported a robust program of sterilization of men and women.[18] Assuming that Lee died in the hospital, he would have been among the 89 who died there in 1932.[19]
What happened to Lee Pattie?[20] How did he go from a functioning member of society, married and engaged in activities that were published in the local paper, to a patient at a psychiatric hospital for the last fifteen years of his life? For the moment, I have no clear answers. It was common for people to spend time in one of the hundreds of psychiatric hospitals around the United States. Lee’s length of stay at Topeka is also not clear. It is entirely possible that he just happened to be at Topeka during the 1920 and 1930 censuses. If he was in fact, there from 1917 to 1932 he must have suffered from a very serious condition. Was his condition already serious when he was admitted or did life in the hospital aggravate his condition rendering his ability to function outside more and more impossible. It is unlikely that drink led him to a 15-year stay at the hospital. Perhaps drinking was a form of self-medication.
As the paper trail on Lee Pattie closed for me, I returned to Lee’s little sister, my grandmother, Mary Pattie. At the time of Lee’s confinement, Mary was 24 years old. His confinement was a matter of public record and likely everyone in town would have known about it. Everyone in town knew when two people went out for a picnic.
Mary appeared frequently in the local newspaper. Along with her mother Mary (or as she sometimes is named in the papers “Mae”), she was a Red Cross Charter Member in Caldwell.[21] She also appears in the paper’s social news periodically, having gone for picnics and day trips. In 1918, her future husband, Charles Ross Ablard (referred to as R.C. and C.R.) came back to Caldwell after a brief stint at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with the Marines.[22]
He wasted no time in getting back to work. By December of that year, he had purchased the Caldwell Steam Laundry from its owner, C.W. Cupp.[23]
Meanwhile, his courtship with Mary reached its conclusion and they were married in 1921, which of course was deemed newsworthy, and a long paragraph described their modest honeymoon in Wichita.
Business at the laundry must have gone reasonably well because, by 1922, he purchased the “Leland hotel lease […] from R.J. Malone and took immediate possession.” Mary took over running the hotel’s restaurant. And advertisement noted that there was no music in the dining hall.[24] Judging from the newspaper stories, they were pillars of the community. [25]
I cannot imagine that the fate of Mary’s brothers must have weighed on her heavily. Whether drinking caused Lee’s mental health crisis or whether it was its outward manifestation, she developed a very strong dislike of drinking. Joe’s arrest for stealing whiskey and his early death, divorced, signals a strong possibility of a hard life. Did she feel humiliated or ashamed by the news reports about both brothers? Did she visit Lee after he was hospitalized? If she did, that might have added to her own emotional baggage.
There’s a growing body of literature by people who learn of a family member’s mental health or substance abuse crisis. They make sense of the stories in different ways. [26] The story I have told happened a century before people were sharing these kinds of stories. My grandmother’s story also reminds me that historians of psychiatry have not paid close attention to the families of those confined to hospitals. I think part of the reason is simply that the sources are hard to come by. [27]
As I pieced together the stories of Joseph and Lee Pattie, a very incomplete picture emerges. In the end, I learned a lot from small town papers, but perhaps less about the two men themselves and more about how the stories of the lives circulated in the communities where they lived. And I have so many questions I would want to ask my grandmother, who died near the end of the last century.
Jonathan Ablard is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean and professor of History at Ithaca College. He is the author of Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983, published by University of Calgary Press in 2008, as well as articles on the history of military conscription in Argentina, obesity in Latin America, and conspiracy theories.
Notes
[1] Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987).
[2] The Herington Times (August 22, 1912): 6. “Fireman Joe Pattie has moved to Kansas City out of which he has a run.” According to the same paper, he went fishing at Woodbine, Kansas. The Herington Times (June 27, 1912): 6.
[3] The Wellington Journal (November 14, 1912): 4. See also “Santa Fe wants it Pints Back. Railroad Claims as Personal Property Whisky in Transit Taken from ‘Joint’ Station at Peck. Engine Fireman Under Arrest. Twenty-four Pints of Fire Water at Station Platform Looked Good to Somebody,” The Wichita Eagle (November 13, 1912): 8 and “Taken Fireman from Engine. Trying to learn who Stole a Case of Liquor at Peck.” The Wichita Beacon (November 12, 1912): 6.
[4] The Herington Times (November 1912): 8.
[5] “Draft Registration Card,” Joseph Preston Pattie (1917)
[6] “Certificate of Death” Arizona State Board of Health (1940)
[7] 1900 Census for Union Township, Washita County, Oklahoma
[8] The Wellington Daily News (October 24, 1908): 3. The 1910 Census says Jessie Hutson was born in Kansas. They lived on Osage Street in 1910.
[9] The Belleville Telescope (Belleville KS) (September 22, 1910): 5; The Caldwell News (February 1, 1917): 7.
[10] “Miss May Pattie of Caldwell, Kan., is visiting her brother Lee Pattie,” Republic County Democrat (Belleville, Kansas) (June 18, 1913): 5.
[11] Belleville Telescope and Belleville Freeman (June 1, 1916).
[12] Republic County Democrat (Belleville, Kansas) (April 19, 1916): 6.
[13] In Ancestry.com, Lee’s card appears in a long succession of similar cards.
[14] The Caldwell News (May 17, 1917)
[15] On the practice of widespread removal of teeth and non-vital organs under the misguided belief that sepsis caused mental illness, see Andrew Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
[16] State of Kansas, Twentieth Biennial Report of the Topeka State Hospital Made to the State Board of Control (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1918).
[17] State of Kansas, Twentieth Biennial Report of the Topeka State Hospital Made to the State Board of Control (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1934): 3
[18] State of Kansas, Twentieth Biennial Report of the Topeka State Hospital Made to the State Board of Control (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1934): 6
[19] State of Kansas, Twentieth Biennial Report of the Topeka State Hospital Made to the State Board of Control (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1934): 15
[20] His wife quickly divorced him, and remarried, according to the 1920 census. (Email with Sumner County HIstorical Society, 2/11/2020)
[21] “Red Cross Charter Members,” The Caldwell News (June 21, 1917): 2.
[22] The Caldwell News (October 31, 1918): 8.
[23] The Caldwell News (December 19, 1918): 11
[24] The Caldwell News (April 27, 1922): 5; The Caldwell News (November 30, 1922): 1.
[25] C.R. Ablard is listed as a jury member in 1920. The Caldwell News (August 12, 1920): 9.
[26] Here’s a selected sample. Brett Walker, A Family History of Illness: Memory as Medicine. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018; Judith Hillman Paterson, Sweet Mystery: A Southern Memoir of Alcoholism, Mental Illness, and Recovery (FSG 1996); Tom Davis’s A Legacy of Madness: Recovering My Family from Generations of Mental Illness (Hazelden 2011; Scattered On the history of Cuban psychiatry, see Jennifer Lambe, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (New York: Hachette, 2024)
[27] The question of the families of patients is not addressed in the comprehensive guide to researching and writing history of psychiatry. Chris Millard and Jennifer Wallis, editors. Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2022).