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By Root 1644 0

the carriage slowed down, Maria Halpin found herself on the far outskirts of the city. The carriage turned into the private entranceway of the Providence Lunatic Asylum and came to a stop. Maria was told to climb out, and, with Watts and Curtin on either side of her, she was escorted into the lobby and directed to the admitting office on the first floor. There she was registered as patient no. 1050. Her medical chart declared her to be suffering from onomania, a now-arcane medical term that a 19th-century medical guide for doctors and lawyers described this way: “A peculiar form of insanity, in which the patient breaks out into paroxysms of alcoholic excess, attended with violence, strange, or even indecent acts, due apparently to uncontrolled impulses.” The medical entry log recorded on the night of Maria’s admittance indicates that she was also suffering from dementia tremens, or DTs—that is, she was exhibiting tremors and other physical symptoms of withdrawal from alcoholic abuse.

Maria was taken to a private room to spend the night. She must have wondered, as she tried to fall asleep, how it had come to this. Years later, she would explain that she had never intended to go public with her accusations against Grover Cleveland, believing that she had as much at stake as Cleveland did in avoiding a public scandal and in keeping her shame a private matter. But this terrifying night brought her face-to-face with the reality: Cleveland was the unseen hand that had ripped her son from her arms and thrown her into a mental institution. From then on, she would later tell her family, she utterly “loathed” the man.

In the morning, Maria got a sense of her surroundings. The Providence Lunatic Asylum was set on twenty-three acres, at Main Street and Kensington Avenue. It was a gracious four-story yellow brick farmhouse situated on the highest point of land within Buffalo’s city limits, chosen partly because it offered a delightfully cool breeze in the summer. In the years to come, the name of the institution would be changed to the Providence Asylum for the Insane and Inebriate, and still later, to the more benevolent-sounding Providence Retreat. But for now, it was the Providence Lunatic Asylum, in the domain of the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic order dedicated to serving the poor. It could only have been to Maria’s relief that she was in the asylum and not incarcerated next door, at 3399 Main Street. That was the Erie County Almshouse, or Poor House—a true snake pit, notorious for chaining inmates half naked to benches and posts. Rosaline Brown, the Sister Superior at the Providence Lunatic Asylum, had once walked through the almshouse and found that the inmates “resembled wild animals rather than human beings.”

Sister Rosaline had raised the $8,000 needed to build the Providence Lunatic Asylum in 1861, and during those early days, accommodations were of the “poorest kind.” The mattresses were made of straw; water had to be carried in enormous casks from a mile away; and there was no money for oil lamps, so light was provided by handmade tallow candles. Sister Rosalie often told the other sisters, “Pray that I may meet some good soul who will give me money for today’s marketing. I have not a dollar in my purse.” Most of the patients were destitute, under treatment for hysteria or nervous prostration, for which the asylum billed the city or county $2.50 a week per patient. Private patients filled the other beds. These were alcoholics or opium and morphine addicts who could afford their own board and were charged $10 a week, income that defrayed the cost of running the institution.

Like other progressive 19th-century advocates for the rights of the mentally ill, the Sisters of Charity held to the belief that insanity could be cured through peace and quiet and a bucolic setting. Consequently, the grounds of the Providence Lunatic Asylum were beautified with shrubbery for shady walks and private contemplation. A dairy and a hennery supplied abundant fresh milk and eggs. People were treated humanely, and private rooms were even