Look at this map. See that solitary little dot in north-eastern California, just west of Lake Tahoe and Reno, NV?
I want to know where that is, and what the name of the hospital is. According to the legend on the map, that dot is actually a star and represents a privately owned institution.
When I look at Google maps, the only towns I see in that general area are Truckee and Lake Tahoe, CA.
I don’t see Truckee or Lake Tahoe on the lists (although there is a remote chance that one could appear in the blurred gutter of the first scan – unfortunately, I’ve already returned the book so I can’t check). Truckee and Lake Tahoe also don’t quite match up with the dot on the scanned map, although that probably wasn’t drawn to scale. I think the circle drawn in central-ish CA represents Sacramento, and there are no towns north-east of Sacramento except the two I mentioned. The area appears to be just national forest.
It’s possible that that dot represents someone’s private home, which could be out in the middle of nowhere. Google maps shows that that little section of CA is pretty sparsely populated, but even zooming in and pouring over the area like a CIA agent looking at spy satellite imagery, I can’t seem to find any area that would indicate a mental hospital/private sanitorium/whatever once stood there.
Any way you could help me would be appreciated!
(All scans in this post were taken from Institutional Care of Mental Patients in the United States, by John Maurice Grimes, self-published in Chicago in 1934.)
I went to a wedding reception* in Sierraville, CA in 2003 and seem to recall either seeing a historical placard or someone telling me about a “sanitarium” that used to be there. It was an open bar, so my recollections are a bit hazy of that event.
Sierraville would be a little north of the star on the map, but the map looks a bit hoakey to me.
Try searching Sierra or Placer county records. Hope this helps…
But it probably doesn’t.
*Already divorced. “Bride” remarried. Some people just don’t learn.
Thank you so much – I think this might be the place! It’s north-east of Sacramento, and I would imagine that in the 1930s, Sacramento’s city limits were much smaller than they are today so the distance between Sacramento and Lincoln may have been greater.
I’m searching for the info because…uh, well, sometimes I just get fixated on something that I simply must know. And I’m thinking of writing a story set there.
I found this page, which places Joslin’s Sanitarium (aka Live Oak Grove Sanitarium) in Placer County. It also mentions a few sanitariums (sanatoriums? sanitaria?) in Weimar, like Twoflower suggested, but since they don’t appear in the list I posted, I’m thinking they may have been sanitariums of a different sort, like the ones for tuberculosis in Colfax City. I’ll do a little more investigating to see if any of those might fit the bill; otherwise, I’ll go with Joslin.
