How did people die in the almshouse?

For a while I've had a very ambitious plan in mind. It began with the Episcopal cemetery. I've always liked cemeteries because they provide a material link to ordinary people from the past -- the kind of people I can imagine being my friends and neighbors. It seemed like a democratizing gesture to study and preserve cemeteries: a means of bringing attention to our historical counterparts, the farmers, bakers, shoemakers, and housewives of the 18th and 19th century whose stories help to personalize the sweeping course of historical movements.

But there are another class of people who are even more neglected than the "ordinary" (read: middle-class) residents of the Episcopal cemetery. They were buried in mass graves in potter's fields and in the cemeteries of institutions. They may have received a grave marker, or they may have not. If they did receive a grave marker, it may have been made of perishable materials, and it may not have recorded their names. Today many of their graves are unmarked, unknown, even obliterated.

Such erasure is an affront to the cult of individualism that forms the ideological core of capitalist society. According to this ideology, we are all individuals. The irony, of course, is that individuality and homogeneity seem to go hand in hand. According to some Marxist archaeologists, individuality is an illusion that masks the reality: we are all interchangeable. In Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism (1999), Mark P. Leone summarizes the theory of E. P. Thompson:

Thompson argues that the individual is a social creation, and that those people who realize their lives within the notion of individualism are not individuals as they conceive themselves to be, but rather are the interchangeable units of a society that makes its profit from selling the labor of persons who come to be seen as duplicates (200).

Material culture is both the reflection of this reality and the substrate from which it is created. Leone cites ceramics as an example. With the 18th century, tablewares were more and more likely to be individualized, that is, accumulated in numbers that were intended to be proportionate to the number of people being served. Everyone got his or her own plate, cup, saucer, and bowl -- a true innovation in a society that had been accustomed to using communal tablewares. Yet the ceramics also increased in homogeneity at the same time they increased in number. A set of tablewares was one in which all of the pieces were the same. Both ceramics and people were being homogenized.

So how does this connect to the almshouse? The almshouse, much like the prison, was an institution centered on the production of individuals. Consider what Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish (1979):

"... individualization is ‘descending’: as power becomes more anonymous and functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized … In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal … when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing" (193).

Institutions like the almshouse provided the blueprints for imposing discipline on the rest of society, not through external coercion, but by conditioning people, from an early age, to internalize order and social expectations. 

In my thesis, I hope to explore how the Westchester County Almshouse functioned as an instrument of discipline, not only for the people who lived there, but for all of society. But I have a parallel project in mind, which is to identify all of the people who were buried in the almshouse cemetery, and in doing so make some effort to counteract the forces that have (and continue to) erase "undesirable" people from society. The fact that the middle-class cemetery stands, while the almshouse cemetery is buried under a highway, is not a coincidence. It is practically allegorical. It demonstrates how inequalities of the present are perpetuated in historical memory. Marginalized in life, the residents of the almshouse are also marginalized in death.

Unfortunately, this project is easier said than done. There is no simple document that identifies all of the burials in the almshouse cemetery (that I have found, anyway). Instead, I have been combing through the enormous ledger documenting all of the people who were living in the almshouse as of 1875 or later (1875 is the year that New York State passed a law requiring almshouse to keep such records. Before that year, evidence is scanty) and recording the ones who died while they were there. Between 1875 and 1879, 1,490 people were listed as residents of the almshouse; 220 of them died. That's about 15%. I have also been looking for mortality schedules in the federal census that list the residents who died that year. These are very valuable records, but unfortunately they only capture people who died in the almshouse in the year the census was taken (once every ten years). 

Note that not all of the people who stayed at the almshouse would really qualify as "residents." Some of them stayed less than a week before leaving. Some of them stayed only a day before they died. Some of them lived there for decades and died there. It's very difficult to gauge the quality of care that the almshouse inmates (as they were known) received from death rates alone. Many of the residents would have suffered from ill health for months or years before they arrived at the almshouse. Still, it is safe to say that conditions at the almshouse weren't optimal. Judging by the intake records, residents were forced to work as much as their health allowed; they received only two meals a day (prior to 1890); and there was no dedicated hospital before 1900. While many of the people who died at the almshouse were elderly, it wasn't unusual for young adults and children to die unexpectedly. 

In the document above, from the mortality schedules of the federal census, records 28 deaths in the almshouse in the year ending May 31, 1880. It's difficult to read, but I have been able to gather the following data:

Sex

Number of men: 18 (64.3%)

Number of women: 10 (35.7%)

Race

White: 25 (89.2%)

Black: 3 (10.7%)

Marital Status

Single: 13 (46.4%)

Married: 1 (3.6%)

Widowed: 14 (50%)

Age

Infant (0-2 yrs): 1 (3.6%)

Child/adolescent (3-19 yrs): 0 (0%)

Young adult (20-39 yrs): 2 (7.1%)

Middle adult (40-59 yrs): 9 (32.1%)

Old adult (60+ yrs): 16 (57.1%)

Average age*: 62.1

Average age of men: 59.2

Average age of women: 63.5

*The one infant is not counted.

Youngest age: One month

Oldest age: 88

Birthplace

New York: 13 (46.4%)

Ireland: 10 (35.7%)

Germany: 3 (10.7%)

Switzerland: 1 (3.6%)

France: 1 (3.6%)

Profession* 

Laborer: 17 (62.9%)

Servant: 8 (29.6%)

Keeping house: 2 (7.4%)

*The one infant is not counted.

Cause of Death

Consumption: 6 (21.4%)

Heart disease: 4 (16%)

General debility: 3 (10.7%)

Brain disease: 2 (7.1%)

Cramps: 1 (3.6%)

Epilepsy: 1

Apoplexy: 1

Old age: 1

Septicemia: 1

Gangrene: 1

Bronchitis: 1

Pneumonia: 1

Kidney disease: 1

Illegible: 2

So what can we glean from this data?

First of all, it may come as a surprise that the average age of the adults who died is 62.1, 63.5 for women and 59.2 for men. This seems fairly high, considering that in 1880, the average life expectancy at age 20 was 62.2 years for both men and women. However, it would be wrong to conclude from this that the residents of the almshouse were living about as long as the average man or woman. Rather, the data is likely skewed by the fact that residents of the almshouse were more likely to be elderly than the average population. That the women who died in the almshouse were slightly older than their male counterparts isn't surprising; with an older population, women were less likely to be of reproductive age, and therefore less vulnerable to the potentially fatal complications of pregnancy and childbirth.

The ratio of men to women (64.3:35.7) is similar to that of the total population of the almshouse in 1870 (62.8:37.2), suggesting that at least in this year, men and women in the almshouse died at equal rates.

To make any conclusions on the causes of death, I would have to compare these numbers to those for the average population. But I will say that consumption, heart disease, "general debility," brain disease, epilepsy, and kidney disease all have the potential to be drawn-out, wasting illnesses that would incapacitate the victim for a long period of time prior to death. It is therefore not surprising that these "slow" illnesses would account for such a large portion of the deaths in the almshouse, as opposed to, say, highly virulent and deadly diseases like influenza, cholera, or measles. My theory is that victims of "fast" killers would be more likely to die at home, where they would have been incapacitated for only days or weeks prior to their deaths, while victims of "slow" killers would have been brought to the almshouse when their families realized they didn't have the resources to provide the months or years of care they would need.

It's just a theory, however, and one that will need more testing. For now, I am focused on identifying the rest of the people who died in the almshouse, in the hope that I can then determine whether they were buried on the almshouse grounds. Most likely, the majority were, but a few may have been claimed by their families for burial elsewhere. It would be unfair to condemn families for "abandoning" their relatives to the almshouse. Some people undoubtedly were abandoned and neglected, but others simply had the misfortune to come from very poor families (or to have no family at all). Some of the records explicitly mention that a person's family had run out of money supporting him or her. Others say that the person has family willing to support them but is "too proud" to ask for help. And some records contain the name and addresses of family or friends who promised to bury the person upon his or her death. 

Some families, however, may have been too poor to provide their relative with a burial, and thus the person was buried in the almshouse cemetery. I'll discuss more of the details surrounding the fate of the almshouse cemetery in a later post, but for now, I thought I'd mention the efforts at the Oregon State Hospital that have partly inspired all of this work.

The Oregon State Hospital contains the cremated remains of 3,600 people who died there between 1914 and 1971 and were never claimed by relatives. A few years ago, a state senator visiting the hospital was shocked to see the thousands of urns locked away in the dilapidated crematorium. He led a project to rehouse the remains in a public memorial and to reunite as many of the urns as possible with their families. 

This is the kind of outcome I would like for my project, albeit on a more modest scale (the Oregon State Hospital had the advantage of a high level of public interest, partly generated by its association with the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which was filmed there).