The Durham Rose Bowl

Fans of the football teams at the major North Carolina universities may be scratching their heads in search of a connection between this state and tonight’s Rose Bowl game. Indeed, it’s been a while since a team from the Tar Heel state traveled to Pasadena: the last was Duke, who lost 7-3 to USC in the 1939 Rose Bowl. But the Blue Devils are able to claim an even more significant connection to the game. Duke had already accepted an invitation to face Oregon State in the 1942 Rose Bowl when the attacks on Pearl Harbor shook the nation. Determined to go ahead with the game, but wary of holding it on the west coast, the game’s organizers decided to relocate to Durham. The Durham Rose Bowl was held on January 1, 1942. Despite the home field advantage, Duke lost to the visiting Beavers by a score of 20-16.

The Duke University Archives has the story of the Durham Rose Bowl, with game photographs, on its website.

Dorothea Dix Hospital and Bird’s Eye Views

Lunatic Asylym' from Bird's Eye View of Raleigh, 1872

The January 2006 This Month in North Carolina History feature looks at the work of Dorothea Dix in North Carolina and her role in establishing a facility for caring for mentally ill North Carolinians.

The illustration of the hospital shown here is from a “Bird’s Eye View” map of Raleigh from the collections of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has digitized a number of these fascinating maps, including ones depicting Asheville, Winston-Salem, Rocky Mount, and Hendersonville.

January 1849: Dorothea Dix Hospital

This Month in North Carolina History

Image of Dorothea Dix
In the 1830s and 1840s the United States was swept by what one historian has described as a ferment of humanitarian reform. Temperance, penal reform, women’s rights, and the antislavery movement, among others, sought to focus public attention on social problems and agitated for improvement. Important among these reform movements was the promotion of a new way of thinking about and treating mental illness. Traditionally, the mentally ill who could not be kept with their families became the responsibility of local government, and were often kept in common jails or poorhouses where they received no special care or medical treatment. Reformers sought to create places of refuge for the insane where they could be cared for and treated. By the late 1840s, all but two of the original thirteen states had created hospitals for the mentally ill, or had made provision to care for them in existing state hospitals. Only North Carolina and Delaware had done nothing.

Interest in the treatment of mental illness had been expressed in North Carolina in 1825 and 1838 but with no results. Several governors suggested care of the mentally ill to the General Assembly as a legislative priority, but no bill was passed. Then in the autumn of 1848 the champion of the cause of treatment of the mentally ill made North Carolina the focus of her efforts. Dorothea Lynde Dix was a New Englander born in 1802. Shocked by what she saw of the treatment of mentally ill women in Boston in 1841 she became a determined campaigner for reform and was instrumental in improving care for the mentally ill in state after state.

In North Carolina Dix followed her established pattern of gathering information about local conditions which she then incorporated into a “memorial” for the General Assembly. Warned that the Assembly, almost equally divided between Democrats and Whigs, would shy from any legislation which involved spending substantial amounts of money, Dix nevertheless won the support of several important Democrats led by Representative John W. Ellis who presented her memorial to the Assembly and maneuvered it through a select committee to the floor of the House of Commons. There, however, in spite of appeals to state pride and humanitarian feeling, the bill failed. Dix had been staying in the Mansion House Hotel in Raleigh during the legislative debate. There she went to the aid of a fellow guest, Mrs. James Dobbins, and nursed her through her final illness. Mrs. Dobbins’s husband was a leading Democrat in the House of Commons, and her dying request of him was to support Dix’s bill. James Dobbins returned to the House and made an impassioned speech calling for the reconsideration of the bill. The legislation passed the reconsideration vote and on the 29th day of January, 1849, passed its third and final reading and became law.

For the next seven years construction of the new hospital advanced slowly on a hill overlooking Raleigh, and it was not until 1856 that the facility was ready to admit its first patients. Dorothea Dix refused to allow the hospital to be named after herself, although she did permit the site on which it was built to be called Dix Hill in honor of her father. One hundred years after the first patient was admitted, the General Assembly voted to change the name of Dix Hill Asylum to Dorothea Dix Hospital.


Sources:

Margaret Callendar McCulloch, “Founding the North Carolina Asylum for the Insane,” North Carolina Historical Review, vol.13:3 (July, 1936).

Dorothea Lynde Dix, Memorial soliciting a state hospital for the protection and cure of the insane: submitted to the General Assembly of North Carolina, November, 1848. Raleigh, N.C.: Seaton Gales, printer for the State, 1848.

Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Stranger and traveler: the story of Dorothea Dix, American reformer. Boston: Little Brown, 1975.

Richard A. Faust, The story of Dorothea Dix Hospital. Raleigh, N.C., 1977.

Image Source:

“Lunatic Asylum. Rear View.” Inset illustration in “Bird’s eye view of the city of Raleigh, North Carolina 1872. Drawn and published by C. Drie.” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.