Little Rock, Arkansas: The Asylum That Buried Thousands in Unmarked Graves

In 1975, a construction crew breaking ground for a government complex on West Markham Street in Little Rock, Arkansas, unearthed an estimated three thousand to four thousand bodies buried in shallow, unmarked graves. They were patients of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum — committed not only for mental illness but for alcoholism, epilepsy, poverty, old age, and conditions as vague as "emotional difficulty due to menopause." Most had no family to claim them. Most had no headstone. Most had no name left in any record the state still kept.

Shane Waters traces the full arc of this institution, from its hopeful founding in 1883 under the progressive Kirkbride Plan — which demanded sunlight, fresh air, and a maximum of 250 patients — to its collapse into a warehouse for the forgotten, where the patient census swelled past 5,000 in buildings designed for 1,750. Along the way, the asylum survived a devastating tornado in 1894, cycled through name changes meant to mask its failures, and forced patients into unpaid labor on a segregated farm. The story of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum is a story about what happens when a society decides some people are not worth treating — and eventually decides they are not worth remembering.

Timeline of Events

The history of institutional mental health care in Arkansas stretches across more than a century of ambition, neglect, and rediscovery.

1873: Arkansas legislators H.M. McVeigh and D.P. Baldwin introduce Act 66, appropriating $50,000 for a state asylum. Governor Elisha Baxter signs it into law on April 19.

1883: The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum opens on March 1 under Superintendent Dr. Chastaine Caldwell Forbes, with the first patient admitted days earlier by legislative order.

1894: A tornado destroys multiple wards of the South Wing on October 2, killing asylum physician J.T. Ingate and causing over $1 million in damage.

1934-1935: Patient census reaches 4,996 to 5,046 — nearly three patients for every bed in a facility designed for 1,750.

1963: The original Kirkbride asylum buildings are demolished. All traces of the structure vanish.

1975: Construction crews discover an estimated 3,000-4,000 bodies in unmarked graves. Roughly half are relocated to the Benton Services Center cemetery; an estimated 1,500-2,000 remain beneath government buildings and parking lots.

Historical Significance

The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum represents one of the most stark examples of institutional failure in American mental health history. What began as a progressive experiment in architectural healing — rooted in the Moral Management movement of Philippe Pinel and William Tuke — devolved into systematic overcrowding, forced labor, and mass anonymous burial. The 1975 discovery of thousands of unmarked graves beneath state-owned land forced a reckoning with how Arkansas treated its most vulnerable citizens for nearly a century. Today, researchers through the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum WordPress project and the Privett Family Photo Album are working to recover the names and stories of forgotten patients. The site along West Markham Street remains in use as state government offices, with a modest memorial standing over the one-acre plot where an estimated 1,500-2,000 souls still rest beneath the soil.

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