In the 1940 census of Fork township, Wayne County, N.C.: at Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum, Negro, James Edward Gerald, 9. [He was not the youngest inmate. Mixed among the hundreds housed at the hospital were children as young as 5.]
I have no further information about Mary Sims. There were few treatments for mental illness in the 1930s, and even fewer effective ones. Given the danger her alleged actions posed, it is possible that she was sent to the Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum in Goldsboro (later known as Cherry Hospital), the state’s only psychiatric facility for African-Americans.
Mental illness was often criminalized in the early twentieth century and, Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum notwithstanding, treatment options were few.
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In the 1910 census of Wilson, Wilson County: house servant Annie Cole, 25, and lodger Lue Merritt, 30, odd jobs laborer, shared a household.
In 1891, Rev. Owen L.W. Smith‘s sister, Millie Smith Sutton, shot and killed his wife Lucy Smith at point-blank range, believing that Lucy had poisoned her son.
Wilson Advance, 9 July 1891.
On 5 November, the Advance reported that Smith had been found “mentally deranged” at the time she killed Smith and was committed to the insane asylum in Goldsboro.
Ten years later, on 22 November 1901, the Times reported that Sutton had been released from the hospital and had returned to Wilson and, with Carrie Pettiford, had threatened the life of her brother’s newest wife, Adora Oden Smith. (In the 1900 census, Carrie was a boarder in the Smiths’ home.) Both were arrested.
Again, if you are interested in the wretched world of the Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum, please read Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner’s Unspeakable, the story of Junius Wilson (1908-2001), a deaf African-American who spent 76 years there, including six in the criminal ward, though he had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge.