NEWS.Central-State-Hospital-Cemetery.1997.Jefferson Today's Louisville Courier - Journal has a front-page story about some gravestones, recently discovered in a creek in E. P. "Tom" Sawyer Park by a man and his two grandchildren. They apparently were from a cemetery for the Central State Hospital in Jefferson County, with burials dating from 1873. The Hospital's former chaplain could recall the cemetery, and the article quotes a genealogist and engineer named Gene Goodbub, who recalled finding a pile of 20 to 30 stones near the creek in 1962, when that part of the E.P. Sawyer Park was Central State's farm. Clarence Barton, the former chaplain, said that this cemetery was no longer in use when he came to Central in 1952. By the late 1950's it was overgrown and efforts to clean up the cemetery with inmate labor resulted in the headstones being moved off to the side, apparently without keeping track of where they were. Many of the graves had been marked with little wooden crosses, and many of those had been lost or broken up even before the "restoration." When Barton came in 1952 a smaller cemetery was being used, known as the "new addition" or "Stawberrry Hill," it was surveyed in 1991 by U of L Archealogist Phil DeBlasi. But DeBlasi did not know about the older, unmarked cemetery, which abuts the eastern line of the fence that encloses the new addition. The article, written by Scott Wade of the Courier Journal, says that the number of burials in the cemetery are unknown, and that the hospital's death registers from 1873 to 1936 are not to be found at the hospital or the Archives. The Courier-Journal requested information from the later death registers, but says they were refused by the Cabinet of Human Resources, which cited confidentiality laws. In a side article, Wade writes that not all of Central State's inmates were insane; some were the impoverished and abandoned elderly. A 1921 suit charged that veterans there will ill-fed and compelled to do hard work, and grand jury investigations in the 1940's focused on poor living conditions and overcrowding, especially in the "negro wards." By 1974 patients were screened to prevent the admission of those not mentally ill. State officials, apparently from the Finance Cabinet, will have the stones retrieved and will investigate the cemetery's location. Contributed by: "William A. Davis" Date: 3 Jun 1997