{"id":329,"date":"2008-12-10T06:00:24","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T10:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/?p=329"},"modified":"2009-01-02T18:38:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T22:38:31","slug":"kirkbride-disasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/kirkbride-disasters","title":{"rendered":"Kirkbride Disasters"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found a web site that compiles information about historical disasters: GenDisasters.com<\/a>. It has quite a few entries describing catastrophes that affected Kirkbride asylums. There’s nothing really amazing here, but it’s a good resource for anyone researching the history of a particular hospital. There are a couple good pictures included to boot (like this one of the Kirkbride in Danville, PA<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The entries I’ve found so far include:<\/p>\n

1) Danville Insane Asylum Burns<\/a> – About a fire in 1881 caused by a gas leak which led to an explosion when an asylum employee entered a room with a lit candle.<\/p>\n

2) St. Peter State Asylum Fire<\/a> – A collection of articles about the fire of November 1880. It’s interesting to see how the story changes as details come in.<\/p>\n

3) Little Rock, AR Tornado<\/a> – About a tornado in 1894. It’s more of a general story about damage to the whole city, but it focuses on the asylum and the sad demise of Dr. J. T. Ingate toward the end.<\/p>\n

4) Spencer State Hospital Bridgeway Collapse<\/a> – In 1948, one of the Spencer Kirkbride’s third-floor breezeways collapsed while a group of patients was crossing it. One patient died.<\/p>\n

5) Topeka State Hospital Fire<\/a> – Yet another fire, this time at Topeka in 1958. It was only a small one that fortunately didn’t cause any loss of life.<\/p>\n

6) Independence, IA Tornado<\/a> – A short description of how the Independence Kirkbride was damaged by a tornado in 1882. You have to dig a little for it, but it’s there.<\/p>\n

7) New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane Fire<\/a> – An article about the fire of 1902. It describes the weird scene of 2500 panicking patients.<\/p>\n

8) Anna Insane Asylum Fire<\/a> – This short article from 1881 describes a fire at the asylum in Anna, Illinois with special attention paid to the gallantry of a firefighter named Grace.<\/p>\n

9) Ossawatomie Insane Asylum Fire<\/a> – A fire in 1880 caused a lot of damage and commotion but luckily no loss of life.<\/p>\n

Kind of funny how many fires there were at these buildings given how much effort was put into designing them to be fireproof. I guess nothing’s completely fireproof though and maybe these fires could have been much worse if so much care hadn’t been taken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I found a web site that compiles information about historical disasters: GenDisasters.com. It has quite a few entries describing catastrophes that affected Kirkbride asylums. There’s nothing really amazing here, but it’s a good resource for anyone researching the history of a particular hospital. There are a couple good pictures included to boot (like this one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5,13,32],"tags":[235,192,236],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-news","category-pictures","category-web-sites","tag-disaster","tag-fire","tag-tornado"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}