The Hospital Band of Clarinda, Iowa

It's a serious bunch,
almost solemn,
with a direct gaze
most conductors
would like to see
in a band.

 

Yet their sober faces
seem a bit humorless
as if they might be easily offended.

And some stare with coal-black eyes.
It's a cheerless grave expression

which must have chilled the photographer
who looked at them through the camera lens.

Today I feature a group portrait of musicians in
the Hospital Band of Clarinda, Iowa.

But it was no ordinary medical facility.

It's a large band of nearly two dozen men, mostly brass players with four clarinetists, a flutist doubling on piccolo, and two drummers. They wear neat suits with formal wingtip collar shirts, a gentleman's style from the late 19th or early 20th century.    

Seated on the left is a horn player with a piston valve horn, an instrument once commonly used in France and Britain. In this era German horns with rotary valves were more prevalent in the United States. Next to him is a man with a similar instrument called a mellophone, but it is actually very different since it is played with the right hand and uncoiled it would be less than half the length of the other horn. Standing in the back row are four different types of tuba including a double-bell euphonium, a novelty instrument usually   given to a talented soloist. 

Closer inspection of their attire shows a light-color stripe on their trousers and decorative trim on their coat cuffs not unlike a uniform, but more like a military rather than a civilian bandsman's garb. A few men have badges on their coat collars with the initials — I. H. I.  and one man, seated center, has a pair of 5-pointed stars, too. He also has a cornet and a baton, so he must be the band director. 

The initials, I. H. I., stood for Iowa Hospital for Insane. 

These bandsmen were employed at this institution,
once known as the Clarinda Lunatic Asylum.

Hospital for Insane,
Clarinda, Iowa.
will send a letter soon.  Sarah E.

This photo postcard was sent on 9 August 1907 to Miss Lulu Q. Noute of Denver, Colorado. The image shows a sprawling institution set behind a huge grassy field interspersed with a few ornamental trees. The building is made of brick with a succession of three-story wings around a taller central building that features a clock tower. 

Clarinda is a small town and the county seat of Page County, Iowa, situated in the southwest corner of the state near the border of Missouri. In 1884 Iowa's two state asylums in Independence and Mt. Pleasant were deemed insufficient to care for the growing number of Iowans who suffered from mental health problems. A state commission selected Clarinda, whose population was then around 2,000, as the site for a third hospital in the western part of the state.

The commission chose architects from Des Moines to design the Clarinda facility based on ideals promoted by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809 – 1883), a physician, alienist (an old term for a psychiatrist), and hospital superintendent for the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital. Kirkbride is remembered as one of the fathers of modern American psychiatry.

In 1840, Kirkbride was appointed the first superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane located in South Philadelphia. Over the next few decades in Philadelphia, Kirkbride also helped found the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), holding several officer positions in the organization including secretary and president. Through his experience caring for people suffering from severe mental disorders and his background as a Quaker, Dr. Kirkbride rejected the old system of imprisoning people afflicted with psychiatric issues in isolated prisons and poorhouses. Instead he worked at developing new methods that would improve medical treatment and care for the insane.  

Kirkbride envisioned new asylum hospitals that focused on healing the mentally ill by creating places that offered activities to patients, seclusion from suspected causes of illness, and access to medical therapy. His intention was to seek cures for mental disorders that would benefit patients' lives. He advocated for larger institutions which would have abundant exposure to natural light and air circulation, separate wings for men and women, divided floors according to level of mental condition, and access to outdoor activities like gardening and farming. 

His progressive ideas were adopted in the 19th century by many asylums built in America, following institutional building designs that became known as the Kirkbride Plan. Most would have different architectural details but still use a master plan conforming to the Kirkbride "bat wing" scheme which arranged numerous wings attached to a center administration building. The first asylum built to the Kirkbride Plan was the Trenton State Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, constructed in 1848.

1848 lithograph of the Kirkbride design
of Trenton State Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey
Source: Wikipedia

Most of the construction of the Clarinda Hospital for the Insane was completed in 1886 when it first began accepting patients and transfers from Iowa's other two overcrowded asylums. The causes and treatments for mental illnesses, like most diseases and disorders, was still poorly understood by medical science in this time. Doctors at insane asylums like the Clarinda Hospital also treated alcoholics, drug addicts, people with genetic conditions or geriatric dementia, and people with physical disabilities, as well as the mentally ill, and criminally insane. 

Clarinda IA State Hospital for the Insane
Source: Library of Congress
[click to enlarge]

As was the custom of the time, the physicians and staff of Clarinda Hospital lived on the grounds of the asylum. In the 1900 U. S. census for Page County, Iowa, there were 23 pages devoted to the people employed, committed, and living on the 513 acre site. Roughly 150 people were on staff at the hospital. Five were physicians, which included the superintendent, and there were 62 nurses, both male and female. The rest were housekeepers, cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, gardeners, engineers, and farm laborers. The remaining 17 pages of the 1900 census for the Clarinda hospital records 856 names without occupations or comments.

Newspapers in Iowa regularly reported on state institutions like prisons, schools, and hospitals, covering annual expenditures and accounts from superintendents. Often the papers printed dense articles written by special correspondents who had visited a hospital. In December 1895 one writer toured  the Clarinda Hospital for Insane.  One paragraph described the variety of activities and amusements at the hospital, including the hospital band.  

Sioux City IA Journal
16 December 1895

Plenty of Amusement. 

    Amusement is an important feature of hospital life and every effort is made to relieve the tedium of long winter days and evenings by divers entertainments.  The beautiful amusement hall, which Is fitted with a stage and properties, serves as a great pleasure to the patients.  The hospital band, which has a well earned reputation in that section of the state, is an Important factor in the entertainments, and plays for the dances which are given in the large hall every Saturday night.  In the summer open air concerts are given on the lawn three times a week, and the men play ball and engage in numerous other athletic sports on pleasant days.  The women are regularly trained in calisthenics and the men are drilled in military deportment, which seems to have an excellent affect.  The patients are given regular medical treatment and each one Is considered individually.  His physical and mental requirements receive skillful and studious attention, and no means are spared to relieve the suffering of the unfortunate people.  Religious services are conducted regularly by Rev. D. 0. Stuart, the hospital chaplain.  The management holds that under the present methods of caring for the insane it is not enough that medical treatment, trained nurses, and amusements are furnished for patients, but it is also necessary to provide employment for the idle hands and brains in equal abundance. 

In the previous year, 1894, a new superintendent, Dr. Franck C. Hoyt, was appointed to the Clarinda asylum. Dr. Hoyt was a part of a national movement of young physicians who were changing the way hospitals managed the care and treatment of mental disorders. The hospital band was one of his innovations, as was a standard uniform for the hospital's physicians, orderlies, and nurses. It was reported to be made of blue cloth and gold trim.  

According to another report published in April 1897 in the Sioux City Journal:

"Dr. Hoyt is himself a lover of music and has a musical family, and under his patronage a hospital band has grown up which is one of the best organizations in the west.  The members of the band are hospital employees, and they give concerts two or three times a week in the auditorium or general assembly room to the patients, by whom the music is much enjoyed.  The evening spent by the Union County party at the hospital was a concert evening, not only at the hospital, but at St. Joe, Kansas City, and Omaha, whence the music was conducted by long distance telephone. Some idea of the excellence of the hospital band may be gained from the fact that such numbers were rendered as Verdi's "Macbeth," "Il Trovatore" and passages from Wagner and from other authors of equal merit."

I believe that my photo of the Clarinda Hospital Band was taken around this time, 1895–1897, and possibly on the stage of the hospital's auditorium. 

Council Bluffs, IA Nonpareil
4 March 1898

In March 1898 Dr. Hoyt reported that in the previous month the Clarinda Hospital for Insane had admitted 17 new patients; discharged 12 as either recovered, improved, or died; leaving 684 people in care, 413 male and 271 female.   

Later that year Dr. Hoyt left Clarinda to take up the superintendent position of the State Lunatic Asylum in  Mount Pleasant. Iowa. 

    

The Clarinda hospital band continued for at least a year after Dr. Hoyt's departure. In November 1899 the band was one of a dozen bands participating in a welcome home parade in Council Bluffs for U. S. Army troops who were returning from the Philippines after service in the Spanish–American War. But beyond that year the band did not merit any more attention in newspapers, so I presume it faded into memory.

On 21 May 1901 Dr. Frank C. Hoyt died in Kansas City, Missouri while on leave from his position at the Mt. Pleasant Hospital for the Insane. He was not yet 40. The cause of death was tuberculosis complicated by a rheumatic heart, an unfortunate occupational risk for a hospital physician. 

Clarinda Treatment Complex, August 2025
Source: Wikipedia

In 1902 there were almost 1,100 "inmates" at the Clarinda hospital for insane, just a couple dozen more than the patient populations at the other Iowa state asylums in Independence and Mt. Pleasant. Over the next century the facility gradually reduced its patient numbers as medical treatments for mental health changed and improved. More recently it was known as the Clarinda Treatment Complex and in 2015 it was closed. The buildings and grounds are still maintained but no other development for the site is planned.  Below is a Google Street View which gives a better perspective of this historic example of Dr. Kirkbride's ideal hospital.  

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Clarinda is not a very big place, its population was roughly 3,300 in 1890 and only 5,350 in 2020. The surrounding terrain is very flat and the seasons can be pretty harsh with summer temperatures above 100° and winter often in negative double numbers. 

A hospital band of doctors and nurses seems unusual for our time but not for the men in the photo. Once upon a time music could only be enjoyed in a live experience of musical performance. For all that medical science did not know about mental health in the late 19th century, they did understand the calming and healing power of music. That special capacity of harmonious sound, either in vocal or instrumental music, to relieve physical stress, emotional discomfort, or restore memory is now recognized as a proper accredited medical discipline called music therapy. I think that the serious expressions on these bandsmen conceals a pride that they were making music for their patients to enjoy. For a short time, however brief, a brass band could soothe a troubled mind. That's the story concealed in this photo.  

For reasons I can only explain as coincidental, I have written several stories for my blog about photos of bands or orchestras from Iowa intuitions. The first was the The Fort Madison Prison Orchestra; then A Birdseye View of a Girls Orchestra about the Iowa State Industrial School in Mitchellville; Don't This Dazzle Your Eyes! is about the girls' band at the Iowa State Normal School in Cedar Falls; and there are two from Mason City: The Orphans Home Band and the Iowa I.O.O.F. Orphans Home Orchestra. Iowa seems to have a strong musical heritage and lots of clever photographers to record it. 

So I shouldn't have been surprised at the following strange serendipitous report I found this week in my research on the Clarinda Hospital Band. But I was just a little spooked.

Council Bluffs, IA Nonpareil
29 August 1966

60-Year-Old Clarinda Band Photo Turns Up 

A photograph of the Clarinda Hospital hand, believed at least 60 years old, has been found in Missouri.  Mrs. Ona Gideon of rural Jasper, Mo., has asked B. N. Bench, Clarinda postmaster, to help her find some area family interested in having it.  The old picture shows 23 men, 10 of them with mustaches.  Mrs. Gideon said she found the 10 by 17-inch photo in an old frame, behind another picture. 

My photograph is mounted on
heavy maroon-color cardstock with gold edges.
There are 23 men in the photo. Ten have mustaches.   

Is it the same photo?

Who knows?

Only they could tell us,
and they're not talking.  

{After printing the photograph, the photographer discovered that
the eye pupils of several men were bleached out.
So he carefully dabbed a dot of black ink into their eyes.
This is my effort at an improvement.} 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where it is strongly advised
to always keep a-hold of Nurse

for fear of finding something worse.