The Asylum Census
Asylum Census in Bingham County
7/8/20262 min read
The Taber census taker faced distance and cold aboard his horse in 1920, but the census taker at a precinct in Blackfoot likely confronted a set of difficulties all his own. Counting the staff, patients and inmates at the State Insane Asylum required little battle with the weather but you can imagine that some of his interactions were still extremely vexing.
Unlike the rural census taker who got paid by the day, the Asylum enumerator was paid by the name, so the four hundred staff and patients on the grounds must have been a monetary boon—easy pickings, being all housed on the same grounds. The January timingof the census turned out be perfect timing for him, too, for a month later the population was forty less—an investigation the prior year found ten percent of the patients not insane at all, instead they were warehoused for various reasons, and the state sent them to Nampa to the state home for the feeble minded.
That report had found violent inmates weren't segregated from the calm ones, that the patients had to crawl over one another to get to bed due to insufficient space, and medical attention was not available. The attendants, it was said, were untrained transients. The patients were sometimes no more than "aging parents" or relatives committing the "sole crime" of possessing an " unfortunate eccentricity" or "peculiarity of conduct."
The Asylum dwellers, 314 of them patients—there for treatment—and 25 inmates—there to protect society from them or them from themselves— came from all over Idaho and hailed from 32 states and 23 countries. Of the nearly 350 residents, 84 were born in Idaho and Utah, with Missouri (13), Kansas (12) and Iowa (11) the birthplaces of others. Foreign born inmates called Germany (11), Ireland (10), Sweden (9) and Spain ( their homes. Greece, China, Assyria, Holland, Puerto Rico, Hungary and China were the homelands of others.
Only seven of the staff of 36 came from Idaho or Utah. Many came from the Eastern US, the Head and his family from Washington, D.C. and many others from New York and Pennsylvania. Two of the attendants came from Ireland. There was a physician, mechanic, cook, seamstress, head farmer and his laborers, a night watchman and a fireman. The remainder of the staff was mostly attendants.
