2019
Week 6
Prompt - Surprise
Where is Daniel Fesser
Buried?
On September 12, 2018 my husband and I
were on a car trip to Seattle. We traveled to Abbotsford, British
Columbia. We crossed the border to United States and traveled 64
kilometers south to the town Sedro-Woolley. It is about 40
kilometers inland from Puget Sound and about 105 kilometers north of
Seattle. This is a city of about 10,500 (according to the 2010 US
Census) and found in the county of Skagit. This is the city where
The Northern State Hospital is found. According to Daniel Fesser's
death certificate he died on August 4, 1933 at 0550 at Northern State
Hospital. He died from Hypostatic Pneumonia with contributing cause
possibly related to Senile Dementia.
Daniel Fesser is Bill's 2nd
great grandfather. He was quite a character and the first ancestor I
will blog about from Bill's side.
 |
| Northern State Hospital Sedro-Woolley, Washington |
The Northern State Hospital (NSH) has
a history that needs to be explored to find out where Daniel Fesser
might be buried. The NSH was opened April 1, 1911. The hospital
consisted of 4 cottages. They were 2 stories high with a basement
constructed of cement, The roofs were tiled. The kitchen cottage
consisted of an attendant's dining room, bakery, refrigeration and
storage room. The work on the hospital grounds and out buildings
carried on til 1914 and done mostly with patient help. At the end of
September, 1914 there was 287 patients.
Construction came to a screeching halt
in the crash of 1929. By 1936 construction of further wards etc. was
done and it became one of the leading institutions in Washington. In
1953 the local newspaper noted that the hospital had 2200 patients in
32 wards, 415 employees, 200 attendants and 12 graduate nurses.
The NSH closed in 1973 and some of the
buildings are currently used as job corps institution, a drug rehab
facility and the grounds is a recreational park .
Alas where did the hospitals' dead go?
A cemetery was established shortly after opening in 1912 however
there is only one headstone in place and yet about 1500 patients were
to have been buried on site. The cemetery was located in a remote
area in the far eastern edge of the grounds. This area was swampy
and frequent spring floods washed out the area floating the coffins
despite placing stones within to weigh them down. The brick markers
placed above the graves sites did the opposite and usually sunk into
the depths of the swamp.
About a decade after it opened it
became apparent to them that they needed a facility to handle their
dead. In 1926 a morgue and crematorium was built. Macabre as it was
the morgue also had an “anatomical museum” in which the patients
supplied their bodies to the science of anatomy. I cannot fathom what this really means!
The coffins were constructed by the
patients themselves in their woodworking shops. Apparently they were
very basic. The patients were also responsible for digging the
graves and burying the dead. The dead laid in coffins were loaded
onto a horse drawn buggy or in the later years onto the back of a
pick up truck and taken to the cemetery.
Patients who were not claimed by family
or friends were the states responsibility and were the individuals
that were buried on site. Patients of the Catholic faith were buried
using coffins however everybody else were cremated in the
crematorium. Apparently 700 individuals were buried in coffins and
the rest were cremated. The patients who were buried on sight had a
brick placed above them. Due to privacy laws only initials and a
number engraved upon it so that no name would be associated with the
asylum. The cremated remains were put in aluminum tin cans gotten
from the hospital cannery. The name would be scribbled on the side.
When the collection got to a certain size they were told to take the
remains to the cemetery and bury them in between the rows of
existing graves. Apparently a couple hundred cans never made it to
the cemetery but were found many decades later in the morgue
collecting dust. In the 1980's when they were discovered they were
gathered up and taken to Mount Vernon Cemetery where believe it or
not they were once again forgotten but this time in a utility shed.
They were eventually laid to rest in a mass grave in Mount Vernon Cemetery.
The site for the NSH Cemetery was not
well preserved or looked after from it's start. The city crew hired
to take care of the grounds did not know what the brick stones were
so they were removed to make it easier for mowing. In deed some were
piled up against the fence. Some were found in other farmers'
fields. Besides the flooding, cattle were known to graze above it and
in later years the land was sublet to farmers who had no idea what
this area signified. They plowed the land plowing up or totally
displacing the brick shape markers as well as some of the buried cans
with cremated remains.
In the early 2000's a family came to
the grounds to pay respect to their deceased relative and realized
the horrible state of the cemetery. They got the local news involved
in this disrespected spectacle and since then their has been efforts
made to identify the dead and in 2004 a marker was erected to honor
the NSH unknown dead. By 2010 NSH was saved from its reinvention
(among other things a racetrack or county fair was suggested) when a
local resident, Brenda Kinzer lobbied and it was finally put on a
national registry of historic places.
Brenda Kinzer has been on a committee
to restore the old cemetery. The Northern State Preservation group
works to this day to make sure it gets a name, date of birth and
death date of every patient who died within it.
As an aside the NSH is considered
haunted by some and has become a magnet to those seeking their
ghosts. It seems that two movies and a episode of Ghost hunters was
filmed here.
Getting back to the story of being
in Sedro-Woolley last fall we found ourselves at The Sedro-Woolley
Museum.
I spoke to the museum volunteer about
my husband's 2nd great grandfather, Daniel Fesser and how
we have been looking for his final resting place. At this time I
already knew about the hospital's sordid details of their dead. She
went to the back of the museum and brought forth a stapled pile of
papers titled, “Norther State Hospital, Cemetery Burials 1914 –
1952” Also it states that the list is in alphabetical order and
“This list is only about 90% accurate.” The volunteer said there
could be burials that were not listed.
The records were apparently not great
and in fact many records had been lost for many years. Finally they
did come across a partial list. We looked up Daniel Fesser who was
not on the list. I also looked under several possible misspellings
and not found. The volunteer also had a list named “Ashes” which
again Daniel Fesser was not on.
Daniel Fesser's sons, from his first
family, spent many years searching for their father's grave. It
seems no matter where they went they visited the cemetery to try and
find him. Sadly they never found him. If they were alive today they
still would not find his burial place.
I surmise that Daniel Fesser was put
into the hospital by his second wife and family - Sophia Schechtel who
was 44 years his junior. On the death certificate the doctor said he
had know Daniel Fesser since November 7, 1931 until his death. From
this I gather he was admitted to the hospital on November 7, 1931.
Most did not go to the institution willingly thus he was probably
admitted by his wife.
Upon his death I assume that Sophia did
not show up to collect his body. If this were true than I have to
guess that seeing how he was not catholic, he was one of the
individuals who were cremated in the hospital's crematorium and
placed in an aluminum can. God forbid he was one of the individuals
who were part of the “anatomical museum”. In the 1950's when the
morgue on the grounds was shut down, the museum was literally
disposed of into the city dump.
Sadly, I believe he was cremated on
site and placed in a can. From there his path could have been
forgotten on the shelf in the morgue, or buried in between the rows
of grave sites in the cemetery, or found on the shelf in the morgue
and removed to Mount Vernon Cemetery to be forgotten in a utility
shed until they were buried in a mass grave at that site. There will
not be a headstone or marker for his grave site. I am not surprised
that patients from an asylum from the first part of the 20th
century were treated like this.
John Judd is a NW Washington Magazine
writer and in his article, “An old mental institution, and its
cemetery, might get a dignified makeover.” he states it more
succinctly than I ever could.
“Even in death, the stigma of mental
illness haunts these departed souls. The lack of names is a clumsy
result of privacy laws that protected family surnames from being
associated with an asylum. Once inside Northern State, people whose
bodies were not claimed were effectively wiped from history, leaving
dead branches on entire forests of family trees.”
Wendy
This is the only picture of Daniel Fesser that I have. It was taken from the obituary of his oldest daughter - Pauline Fesser's. His wife is Sophia Schechtel and their 4 children.
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