Next to field of sunflowers is Dorothea Dix Hospital Cemetery

It struck me poignantly Wednesday when I came upon the cemetery where there rest several hundred or more patients of the former Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh. What hit me so hard?

The hospital was North Carolina’s first psychiatric hospital, opening in 1856. It closed in 2012.

Of  those hundreds of graves in the cemetery, there are less than two dozen that have anything more than a 12” by 6” concrete horizontal slab marking their resting place. The slab contains the deceased’s name (sometimes merely initials for a first name) and date of death. 

I suspected that the vast majority of those in the cemetery had no family to claim their remains or simply had no financial estate to afford the cost of a traditional burial. 

And when I hunted around on the Internet after I got home, I learned that indeed appears to be the explanation. 

Patients buried in the cemetery died in the period of 1859 to 1970.

Interestingly, the cemetery overlooks the park’s much more celebrated sunflower field to the east. The first photo below shows one of the headstones with the sunflower field visible through an opening between two trees. The headstone is that of Ida Phillips, which you’ll see in a much closer view in the second photo below. Ida’s headstone is one of the few in the cemetery that is upright.

In the first photo below, note that there are two plain slab markers near Ida’s headstone. The deceased in those graves have different last names than Phillips, so I don’t know if they are a relation to Ida, something I wondered considering how close they are to Ida’s grave.

Above: A number of crepe myrtle trees lines the pathway leading to the cemetery of the former Dix Hospital.

In the cemetery’s southeast corner, under a very shady tree, sits the wall of remembrance that you see in the photo leading off the post. The wall is adorned with objects that apparently visitors left behind in remembrance. I’ll have some closeup photos of some of the objects below. 

But first, here are pictures of all the other graves with upright headstones, followed by four examples of the much more prevailing common horizontal identification slabs. 

Above: Here’s a plain slab marker that somehow was uprooted and turned over. Perhaps by a person operating a lawn mower. 

A long-range view of the Wall of Remembrance (above) followed below by closeups of some of the things visitors left behind at, on or at the foot of the wall.