Patients work on the roof of the Lima State Hospital. The institution opened in July 1915 and was intended to relieve the stress on smaller, overcrowded institutions elsewhere in Ohio.
Photo courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
It was, by some accounts, one of the largest poured concrete buildings in the United States.
It is, by any account, massive. But when it opened in July 1915, the Lima State Hospital for the criminally insane, built to house 1,100 patients, had only one, and newspapers across the state jumped on the story.
“Giovanni Catino, an Italian, has the largest and most expensive home in the United States and probably a larger corps of personal attendants than any one man in America,” the Mansfield News Journal wrote July 13, 1915. “Giovanni is the first and only patient of the new Lima state hospital for the criminally insane. The $2,500,000 structure, largest and best equipped of its kind in the world, and its score of employees are all devoted to his care. He eats his meals in the big dining room with its $8,000 soundless floor and is king of all he surveys – for a few days.”
Soon Catino had company as patients began arriving in large groups from overcrowded state institutions in Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and elsewhere.
On September 25, 1915, The Lima News gushed, “Limaites are just beginning to realize that Lima State Hospital is one of the most important institutions in the state. Outside the state penitentiary, there is no penal institution of as great importance.”
The state hospital had been on the minds Lima residents since the first reports more than a decade earlier that the state was looking for a site for such an institution.
“Press dispatches tell of the possibility of a new hospital for the insane being built in some Northwestern Ohio town, and among the cities mentioned as desirable are Lima and Defiance,” the Republican-Gazette wrote April 12, 1904. “This is a matter of great importance and if the state institution could be secured for this city it would mean a great deal to merchants.”
Led by prominent citizens, the city went to work to ensure Lima got the hospital, lobbying in Columbus while rallying residents at home to back the effort.
“The citizens of Lima demonstrated in a royal way the fact that they are a unit in the effort to secure the establishment of the new hospital for the insane. The north, south, east and west sent its representatives to the mass meeting at the courthouse last night and there was a warm, healthy hand clap which brought back cooperation of the past and revived the somewhat flagging interest in the city’s general welfare,” the Lima Times-Democrat proclaimed Sept. 15, 1904.
Lima residents showed their support for the project with more than a healthy hand clap, reaching into their pockets to pledge $500,000 toward the hospital’s construction. Just before Christmas 1904, the state announced Lima had been chosen over Greenville, Marietta and Sidney.
“The State Hospital Commission, after being in session here (Columbus) since Tuesday morning, last evening tendered Lima a magnificent Christmas gift in deciding upon this city for the location for the new institution,” the Republican-Gazette wrote December 23, 1904. The Times-Democrat added, “The location of the new state hospital just north of this city is enough to make us all crazy.”
Such a massive project, of course, required a massive amount of red tape, and it wasn’t until late summer 1908 that work began on the more than 628-acre site off North West Street. On Aug. 12, 1908, the day construction bids were opened, the Times-Democrat headline noted that the staked-off site “shows a building of immense proportions.” It was.
When completed in 1915, the complex included 14 buildings grouped together in a rectangular pattern around a center court. In 1904, it was projected to cost $1.5 million, including Lima’s $500,000 contribution, but came in at well over $2 million when completed in 1908. That included the cost of 70,000 cubic yards of concrete, 12,800 tons of steel, 6 million face bricks, 1,846 windows with more than 48,000 pieces of glass, 35 acres of plastering, 9 acres of flooring and 122,890 feet of electrical wiring.
Lima State Hospital opened in July 1915, and Cantino, who had been tried for murder in Marysville and was described by the Marysville Journal-Tribune as a “degenerate,” became the first person to walk into the Lima State Hospital who could not walk out again. He soon had company, as patients were transferred to Lima from smaller, overcrowded state institutions.
“The $2,500,000 Lima State Hospital at last is actually in use,” the Lima Republican-Gazette wrote July 30, 1915. “Sixty-eight former inmates of the state hospital at Newburg, near Cleveland, yesterday arrived and are now safely behind the heavy concrete walls and barred windows of the greatest institution of its kind in the world.”
In December 1915, the newspaper reported Lima State Hospital had 619 patients. Among them was Wolfe Levine, who would die at the hospital some 67 years later. Levine, of Cleveland, had initially been sent to a reformatory in 1910 after being arrested for theft. Also arriving in 1915 was Ceely Rose, of Richland County, who in 1896 poisoned her parents and brother after they tried to keep her away from a boy with whom she was infatuated. She died at the hospital in 1934 and is buried in the state hospital cemetery on Bible Road. The cemetery had about 450 graves in 1971.
By 1935, Lima State Hospital, like the smaller institutions it was designed to relieve, was overcrowded. Writing in January 2003, The Lima News columnist Mike Lackey noted, “When the facility accepted its first patient, the professional staff numbered six. As late as 1960, the 1,500 patients outnumbered the staff roughly 5-to-1.”
“Over the years there were high-profile escapes – including escapes of killers in 1955 and 1973 – uprisings and suicides,” the Dayton Daily News wrote in February 2003. “By the 1960s, an aging, short-staffed Lima State overflowing with aggressive patients was running up against societal demands for patient rights and humane, less restrictive treatment of the mentally ill.”
The hospital was the subject of high-profile investigations into alleged abuse in the early 1970s, including a 1974 class action suit filed on behalf of patients that resulted in detailed requirements being spelled out for ensuring each patient’s right to “dignity, privacy and human care.”
Beginning in 1982, Lima State Hospital transitioned from mental health hospital to medium-security prison. The state announced in January 2003 that Lima Correctional Institution would close.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
