Dix Hospital Cemetery

Dix Hospital Cemetery. . A Final Resting Place Before the mid-20th century, cemeteries were often part of institutional settings such as prisons, workhouses, poor farms, and public hospitals. When a patient died at a state mental hospital, the body was usually returned to the family for interment. However, the stigma of mental illness sometimes led families not to claim their relatives who passed at the hospital. For those patients and others with no family or means for burial, this hospital's cemetery became their final resting place. , The cemetery's three acres include more than 900 graves. Little is known about many people buried here, but those interred include Civil War veterans like Eli Hill (d. 1877), a Union soldier with the United States Colored Troops who was once enslaved, and Native Americans from the Lumbee tribe from southeastern North Carolina. , Restoring Dignity to the Dead Over the years, the hospital cemetery fell into disrepair due to neglect, erosion and the impact from an adjacent landfill. After the landfill closed in 1972, hospital administrators secured grant funds to clean up the cemetery, build a fence and plant trees around its border, In 1991, local volunteers led by hospital administrators identified 750 patients buried in the cemetery and installed new markers with their names and dates of death and created a memorial wall. Recent research has identified an additional 46 patients buried in unmarked graves. Today, the City of Raleigh maintains the cemetery and plans a full restoration and commemoration of those buried here. , [Captions (left to right)] , . Quince E. Carter's Gravestone. , . Dorothea Dix Hospital Cemetery map ca. 1991. , . Cemetery dedication ceremony c. 1991. From Dorothea Dix Hospital Image Gallery, Asylum Projects