Cemetery tour provides a look at part of Elgin's past

If you get lost behind the Elgin Sports Complex - or you really shank a shot at the Highlands of Elgin Golf Course - you may find yourself standing in a small cemetery where the bodies of 974 patients at the former Elgin State Hospital are buried.

The people were buried at Hillside Cemetery between 1933 and 1986 when the hospital, which is now the Elgin Mental Health Center, provided care for the elderly and indigent. Bill Briska of the Elgin History Museum told a tour group Saturday morning that the cemetery was once near the center of the hospital's farm property where patients worked as a form of therapy.

Plain stones mark the graves in a rectangular clearing that is just over an acre of grassland. It is surrounded by tall trees, partially muffling the noise of nearby youth baseball games and the whacking of golf balls.

Briska, who wrote a book about the history of the hospital in 1997 and who worked as an employee at the two institutions from 1974 to 2002, said he has led a tour of the cemetery annually for the past 15 years.

"The people buried here were ordinary people," Briska said after the tour. "It's like if our grandparents didn't have a place to go."

Briska said at its peak the hospital had a population of just less than 7,000 patients and, in the 1930s, there were about 400 to 500 deaths per year. That was when most of the government funding for the social safety net went to large institutions, like county and state hospitals, Briska said. When people died, the hospital would try to get their remains to their family. Before 1933 if the family didn't take the body, the hospital would pay for a burial plot at a nearby cemetery. But that year, hospital administrators decided to start their own cemetery on the hospital's campus, which was 1,139 acres at its largest.

Briska told the tour group that he worked with some of the patients buried there. In one of his roles at the hospital, Briska digitized the paper records associated with the hospital cemetery.

One of the graves Briska pointed out was that of Robert Wilson, known as Uncle Bob, a former slave who came in his 90s and lived to be 112, although the story is difficult to verify since slaves weren't issued birth certificates. Wilson told of fighting for the Confederate Army and of being taken to a place where the owner forced slaves to breed, though those stories haven't been confirmed by researchers, Briska said.

"Elgin has such of a wealth of knowledgeable people who can talk about our history," said Sue Cutler, an Elgin resident since 2001. She and her husband, Paul, were among the 30 people on the tour.

There were no tropes of spooky graveyard tours, a type of event Briska abhors.

"They're exploiting people who suffer from mental illness," Briska said.