A few dozen markers are visible from the street. There's a chain-link fence on all sides and a sign outside a wrought iron gate that reads: Austin State Hospital Cemetery.
To understand who is buried in the cemetery, we need to go back to 1861. That’s when the state opened a hospital for people with mental illness called the Texas State Lunatic Asylum.The main building of the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, which opened in 1861.
“The state actually institutionalized these people, which relieves the families of the burden,” says Dale Flatt, who founded a nonprofit called Save Austin's Cemeteries. “And in doing so, they created a whole system whereby people were just locked away.” In 1925, the facility was renamed the Austin State Hospital. The name sounded more humane, but life at the hospital was getting less humane.
There was a period when there were more than 3,000 patients at the Austin State Hospital at any given time. Today that’s down to about 250, and the average stay is five months. Rupe turned identifying the folks in the ASH Cemetery into kind of an obsession. He combed through patient records and logbooks. He made a database of the names and locations of all the people he could identify.
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