Take a tour of Elgin Mental Health Center's Hillside Cemetery
Editor's note: Elgin historian Bill Briska will lead a tour of Hillside Cemetery at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 20. Meet at the Highlands Golf Course east parking lot, Elgin Sports Complex, 875 Sports Way, Elgin. The event is free. Contact Bill Briska at (847) 421-4022 or Elgin History Museum at (847) 742-4248.
A hospital with its own cemetery may seem odd today, but not so in the past. Before the mid-20th century, cemeteries were often part of institutional settings such as prisons, county poor farms, seminaries, specialized schools and public hospitals.
The former burial ground of Elgin Mental Health Center is officially known as Hillside Cemetery. Today, the city of Elgin owns the cemetery.
EMHC opened in 1872. During the next four decades, deaths at the hospital were relatively small in number. The bodies were usually returned to the families for interment. If the family could not afford a burial, the remains were turned over to authorities from the deceased's home community. If no other alternative could be found, the dead were buried at Elgin's city owned cemeteries.
State welfare policy changed in 1910. The psychiatric hospital's mission was redefined to include patients whose behavioral symptoms were manifestations of old age, trauma or medical disorders. Diagnoses such as dementia, stroke and advanced stages of syphilis were common.
At the time, nursing homes and hospice facilities were not widely available. Welfare programs such as Medicaid and Medicare did not exist. State mental hospitals began providing these services as part of a widening social welfare safety net.
Between 1910 and 1950 the inpatient census at Elgin State Hospital, as EMHC was then known, rose from 1,450 to more than 5,000. Along with this the number of deaths increased to between 300 and 600 annually. Much of the increase was due to elderly and infirm patients. Many admissions were people already in the last stages of their life.
During the 1930s, psychiatric hospitals opened, or enlarged, their cemeteries. The economic hardships caused by the Great Depression made it difficult for families to purchase burial space. EMHC's cemetery was laid out near the middle of its farmland. The first burial took place on Oct. 27, 1933.
Today, there are 974 marked graves at the cemetery plus a few without headstones. Most of the early headstones were manufactured by the hospital's brick and block making workshop.
Some of the buried could be described as lost and forgotten souls who were quietly laid to rest with little notice or ceremony. However, many patients were buried with staff in attendance. The employees had in essence become the "family members" and they grieved the loss of those they cared for.
It was not until the 1960s that new programs provided funding for psychiatric care outside the hospital. As the EMHC's census dropped, so did the need for a cemetery. After almost 53 years of service, on July 3, 1986, the last burial took place. Only a tiny fraction of the patients who passed away at the Hospital - less than 5 percent - were laid to rest at Hillside Cemetery. Most were buried in family plots.
Ownership of the cemetery was transferred to the city of Elgin in 1979, along with the surrounding farm land. The area has been redeveloped into a sports complex leaving the hallowed burial ground as remnant of a bygone era.