families until they can find employment.

In early days any illness was thought to be caused by good or
evil spirits, so it is small wonder that the most feared illness,
mental, was particularly thought to result from evil influences.
Thus a person so afflicted was often an object of fear, hatred
and rejection. The advances that have been made to care for the
mentally ill have been gradual ones. The first asylum to house
these unfortunates was St. Mary of Bethlehem in London,
officially established by Henry VIII, with its name soon
corrupted to Bedlam. But not until the 18th century and the Age
of Enlightenment did meaningful treatment occur, along with
prison r eform, improvement in public health and changes in the
care of children. Benjamin Rush, "The Father of American
Psychiatry" and a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
joined the staff of Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hospital in 1783.
He too called for more humane treatment of the mentally ill. At
the time the treatment at the Pennsylvania Hospital was bleeding,
restraints and purgatives and was available only to the well-to-
do. The poor were considered to be the responsibility of their
community and were often lumped together with the aged and
orphaaned, considered paupers, and house in the "poorhouse."
This explains why as late as 1859 at Watervliet, George Haney was
taken to the poorhouse. He had come to the community but not
become a member so they felt no responsibility to care for him
and turned him over to the public facility which could care for
him. But it is in this time frame of public health that the
majority of the Shaker cases must be considered.

Let us consider what happened in some of the communities and
begin with Watervliet, New York, the one I know best.


WATERVLIET, N.Y.

In some cases, the Shaker families might well have known that
they were going to have problems with some of their members.
Reuben Treadway joined at Watervliet in 1823 and gradually
brought his children. He left in 1829 but some of his children
stayed on. In 1830 a son, Stacy, "in a fit of insanity went off
to his father and we are released from a crazy and burdensome
youngster." In 1863, Orange Maria, who was an Office Deaconess,
moved back to the dwelling house "to take particular charge of
her sister, Almira, who is somewhat weak-headed." In 1865,
Almira "has another crazy turn" and has to be confined in what
they call "the Kite" in January and again in May, and when she
died in 1872, the journal noted that she "has been insane 10 or