Issue 32, Spring 1994
On the cover: William Frye, one of nineteenth-century Alabama’s most prolific artists, completed this portrait of Mrs. Hugh Watson Rutland (Sarah Louise Goodloe) in the 1860s. [Courtesy Mrs. R. E. Hereford]
Features
Mental Health and Moral Architecture
By Robert O. Mellown
In the 1790s, mental health patients were often confined to hospital basements or chained by the waist or ankles to the walls of ten-foot square cells. But in the 1930s, activists Thomas Kirkbride and Dorothea Dix fought for moral medical treatment of the mentally ill, including an architectural environment more conducive to recovery. And author Robert O. Mellown tells the story of how, in 1852, Alabama became the first state to appropriate sufficient funds for the construction of a mental hospital designed in the new moral architecture, detailing the Alabama Insane Hospital (now Bryce Hospital). Mellown outlines the workings of the hospital, along with changes in the treatment of mental illness both in medical concepts and philosophy of architectural design since the hospital’s construction, and how Bryce Hospital has dealt with these changes.
Insights into an Insane Asylum
By John S. Hughes
In May 1881, thinking he was on a pleasant trip to Tuscaloosa with his family, seventy-year-old Reverend Joseph Camp was admitted to the Alabama Insane Hospital by his wife and son-in-law. The shock of being admitted to the hospital only grew during Camp’s next five months and twenty days as a patient there. Upon returning to his family in November, Camp published his book, entitled An Insight into an Insane Asylum, at his own expense. Camp’s book notes the treatment he received as a mental patient of the Alabama Insane Hospital, including practices of nurses and physicians that often border on cruelty. To this day, Camp’s book remains the only significant exposé of the Alabama Insane Hospital ever written.
When Shall Our Cup Be Full?: The Correspondence of Confederate Soldiers James T. and Reuben M. Searcy
By E. Bryding Adams
In nineteenth-century Alabama, few portrait painters were more successful or more prolific than William Frye. Although his paintings captured a record of the state’s well-to-do families, Frye himself has remained largely unrecognized during the past one hundred years. But with the publication in the 1960s of new studies on portrait books from Southern states, Frye and other artists have begun to receive attention from art dealers, museums, and collectors. While pointing out Frye’s signature painting styles and techniques, author E. Bryding Adams follows the life and artistic career of William Frye, from his beginnings in Alabama to the prosperous 1850s and the hard times of the Civil War. The article is accompanied by striking images of Frye’s work, including both landscapes and portraits for which he is best remembered.
Alabama’s Handwoven Counterpanes
By Lee W. Rahe and Charlotte Jirousek
During the Nineteenth-century, counterpanes were a familiar type of bed covering in the South, a product of the cotton-producing economy of the period. This article presents the different weaves and finishes traditionally associated with handwoven counterpanes, and traces the evolution of their development as handmade objects in the midst of advancing technology to become treasured heirlooms in many Southern families.
Departments
Southern Architecture and Preservation
The Hopkins Pratt House at River Bend
By Mark A. Palmer
When Guy Cobb died at the Tuberculosis Prison Hospital at Wetumpka, Alabama, in 1932, few marked his passing except perhaps the clerk who made the citation of the fact. Cobb’s prison career, however, which included at least seven escapes, was anything but unremarkable. The details of that career, as of many other prisoners, are part of the Alabama Department of Corrections and Institutions records housed at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Cobb’s story is an example of the sorts of things that can be gleaned from among these records.
The Nature Journal
Green Treefrogs
L.J. Davenport examines the life- and mating-habits of the green treefrog.
