Oregon State Hospital and the Room of Three Thousand Urns
Near Salem, Oregon
The Oregon State Hospital has stood near this part of Salem since eighteen eighty-three, and it carries one of the most complicated histories of any institution in the state. It was built according to the principles of physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, who believed that natural light, fresh air, and a well-designed environment were themselves treatments for mental illness. The original structure, the J Building, was constructed in the institutional Kirkbride style, with long wings to maximize ventilation and sunlight. That building is now part of the Oregon State Hospital Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In nineteen seventy-five, the hospital became famous to the world for a different reason: it was the filming location for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the movie adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel. Hospital superintendent Dean Brooks was enthusiastic about the project and even appeared in the film himself. The movie won all five major Academy Awards, the first film to achieve that in forty-one years.
But the hospital's most unsettling chapter came to light in two thousand four, when Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney toured the facility and discovered a storage room containing thousands of copper urns on simple pine shelves. The urns held the cremated remains of patients who had died at the hospital between nineteen thirteen and nineteen seventy-one. Because their families had not claimed them, and because patients of that era were so thoroughly stigmatized and socially isolated, they had simply stayed in that room for decades.
Courtney described the treatment of those urns as mirroring the treatment of the people inside them: neglected and forgotten. The state eventually built a memorial, and as of early twenty twenty-one, the hospital had reunited the remains of six hundred ninety-nine individuals with family members and descendants. The effort continues. Note: the full scope of conditions and care within this institution over its history is complex and not fully summarized here.
