Asylum on the Hill by Ziff Katherine; Gladding Samuel T.;

Author:Ziff, Katherine; Gladding, Samuel T.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press

FIGURE 5.1 Plan for the grounds of the asylum prepared by Cincinnati landscape designer and gardener Herman Haerlin. Board of Trustees of the Athens Lunatic Asylum, 1872 annual report. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.

Yet Haerlin was foremost a gardener and garden designer, all through his career developing meticulous plans for civic parks that remain today graceful natural landscapes, centerpieces of beauty for Ohio’s towns and university campuses. With a careful eye for detail, Haerlin personally supervised the development of his landscapes. His plan for the landscape of the Athens Lunatic Asylum was adopted by its board of trustees in 1868, yet he continued visiting the asylum at Athens for another fifteen years to supervise details, from planting flowers to developing plans for sewage treatment to personally selecting and transporting evergreen seedlings to the asylum and providing clean water for patients and staff. For years the asylum superintendents, in their annual reports to the trustees, wrote of the importance and excellence of Haerlin’s work in moving forward the landscape plans and projects. Wrote the superintendent in 1876, for example, “Our flower gardens and green-house have been very successfully cultivated and have yielded pleasure to all sensible of the charms of nature. That part of the grounds already finished attests the skill and taste of the landscape gardener, Mr. Haerlin, and wins the admiration of all beholders.”6 The asylum’s leadership, with money allocated by Governor Rutherford B. Hayes and the design expertise and vision of Mr. Haerlin, early on accomplished two goals for the asylum’s infrastructure: providing filtered drinking water and beginning a successful gardening operation. For its first five years of operations, the asylum obtained water directly from the Hocking River by means of pipes and pumps, without benefit of a filtration system. A modest river, just a trickle compared to the Ohio River into which it flowed thirty miles away, the Hocking is often muddy. Dr. Richard Gundry, in his annual report to Ohio’s Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, described this chocolate-colored drinking water:

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