Relatives find answers in Northern State Hospital death records as lawmakers pledge support

Last week, writer Brad Bigelow ended a 72-year-old family secret.

Bigelow’s great-grandfather, George Bartels, had not died at home in Seattle as a 1951 newspaper obituary reported, he told his wife and sons over a dinner of pasta salad. Rather, their family member died at 74 as a ward of the state at Northern State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, where he had been committed six months earlier for a form of dementia.

Bigelow was one of more than a dozen people who reached out to the Seattle Times after they discovered their relatives died as patients at Northern State Hospital through records the Times made digitally accessible for the first time last week.

The Seattle Times’ reporting on the abandoned psychiatric hospital has also spurred three state lawmakers to propose new funding to investigate the unmarked graves of Northern State Hospital patients in the next legislative session.

“To hear that there are unmarked graves up there … we need to do the work for the folks up there and their families,” said Rep. Carolyn Eslick, whose district includes the Northern State campus.

Unclaimed remains

More than 1,600 Northern State Hospital patients are estimated to be buried or interred in the cemetery or elsewhere in the Skagit Valley. Most of them do not have grave markers, but the markers that do exist bear only initials and numbers. They’re largely out of order and sunk beneath the surface of the soil. Cemetery volunteer John Horne recently discovered more grave markers and suspected graves outside the cemetery fence. He also suspects even more patients were buried north of this plot of land based on evidence from early property descriptions. Patients’ ashes were also buried in the Northern State Hospital cemetery between graves and in unknown locations. In 1983, a local funeral parlor discovered 200 food cans labeled with Northern State Hospital patient identification numbers. These cans were then buried at another cemetery.

Eslick said she will work with fellow lawmakers representing her district, Sen. Keith Wagoner and Rep. Sam Low, to budget for the graves.

“It’s part of our history, and I believe we need to keep our history front and center so we don’t make the same mistakes we made in the past,” she said.

“It’s history lost,” said Wagoner, former mayor of Sedro-Woolley.

Low said the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation estimated the work could cost around $100,000. He started working with Eslick and Wagoner after the Times story was published, he said.

“I think the timing is right for the community to get full closure on this,” Low said. “We shouldn’t run from our history. We should learn from our history and get closure for families because I think families from all across the state want closure on this.”

Bigelow said he suspected his great-grandfather may have died in an institution after he found a death certificate naming Sedro-Woolley as his place of death. Seeing his relative’s name on the Northern State Hospital death register proved it.

The Seattle Times paid to have the Northern State Hospital death register digitized after successfully pushing the state to make the records public for the first time. For years, the state archives had sealed off records that included patient information, even to descendants. Reporting from the Seattle Times pushed the archives to contact the Attorney General’s Office and revise the policy.

Now, many Northern State Hospital records in the state archives can be accessed by the public if 50 years have passed after patients’ deaths.

“I’m grateful that the records were digitized so my suspicion could be directly confirmed,” Bigelow said.

Retired Boeing employee Tracy Arnold found two relatives in the documents published by the Seattle Times – her great-great-grandmother, who she discovered had also been institutionalized for a form of dementia, and her uncle’s mother, who she learned had been committed to the hospital for a condition related to alcoholism.

Her uncle took the secret of his mother’s institutionalization to his grave, Arnold said. Hospital records say she was cremated but don’t say where she was interred. Nearly 900 patients’ ashes are in metal food cans believed to be buried on the Northern State campus or at another local cemetery.

“(She) could be one of the metal food cans,” she said.

Sedro-Woolley City Council member Joe Burns said the people buried at Northern State “deserve the dignity of proper burial markers” and urged the state to investigate and mark the graves of its former patients.

“We need to remember who they are and honor their lives,” Sedro-Woolley Mayor Julia Johnson said.

Reading through the Northern State Hospital documents made office administrator Kelly Norton realize her institutionalized great-grandfather died just a month before her grandmother did.

The reporting on Northern State, Norton said, “made me think of how many decades we’ve spent trying to treat, and often mistreat, people with mental illness – people perceived as other somehow, people perceived as burdensome.”

The Seattle-based Swedish Finn Historical Society, whose mission is to track the paths of Swedish-speaking Finns who emigrated from Europe, is also analyzing the Northern State Hospital death records to see how many of these emigrants died in the institution. So far, the organization has found nearly 50 likely Finnish emigrants who died at the hospital between 1911 and 1929.

Seattle Times journalists will speak Saturday on the hospital grounds about their work to uncover what happened at Northern State Hospital. The event, which starts at 11:30 a.m., is part of a history event co-hosted by the Port of Skagit, the Sedro-Woolley Museum and the Skagit County Historical Museum.

He uncovered 200 headstones. She was searching for remnants about her great-grandmother’s life. This documentary follows two people’s consuming quest to unearth the truth about Northern State Hospital and revive the stories of its forgotten patients. Watch below.