Wilson Daily Times, 11 May 1938.
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.]
Wilson Daily Times, 2 December 1935.
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.
Clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.
Wilson Daily Times, 24 June 1913.
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.
Wilson Mirror, 2 October 1889.
Wilson News, 24 August 1899.
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.
The Wilson Mirror offered more on 11 November:
This tragedy had sequels.
Six years later, Sutton’s walking companion, Nettie Vick Jones, was stabbed to death on the street by her husband, A. Wilson Jones.
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.
Wilson Daily Times, 25 August 1911.
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.