MARLBORO - A dirt road leads you there, a quarter-mile offRoute 520. Crest a short rise and the eerie sight comes into view.
It’s an isolated graveyard of small headstones. There are 924 of them, and they bear only numbers.
These poor souls lived and died at the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital between 1931 and 1960. When they passed, no one claimed them. The hospital closed 20 years ago this spring, and its buildings finally were demolished in 2013. But the cemetery remains, the last vestige of a grim social experiment.
“It’s kind of a forgotten and sad story, how people ended up in there,” Marlboro historian Thom Healy said. “For the most part they were, unfortunately, lost people from society.”
On Thursday, I came to find someone. Using the brass-plated guide ona memorialthat sits in front of the cemetery, I located the name Adolph Willer. It’s a typo; his actual name was Adolph Miller. As the guide shows, he died in 1954 and his headstone is No. 737.
After a quick search I found his plot. The headstone is not a stone at all. Like a third of the cemetery's markers, it’s metal and rusting. No. 737 also is listing to the right, blown off center by decades of wind. It’s possible that, in the 64 years since Adolph’s demise, I am the first person to visit his grave.
I texted a phototo Denise Laible, his great-granddaughter.
“There he is,” she replied.
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An important reminder
The Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital opened in 1931 on 468 acres of fenced-in farmland. It provided long-term treatment for hundreds of residents living in dormitory-style cottages. After an uneven history pockmarked by scandals— abuse, neglect, suicides and escapees— an undercover investigation by State Sen. Richard Codey led to its closure.
“It certainly started out with the best of intentions like most hospitals, but a number of issues tarnished its image,” said Healy, who worked in the psychiatry field. “I heard both good and bad. It was a place of last resort for a lot of people.”
The cemetery, in a sense, provides the last word on the hospital’s legacy. It’s unclear why the headstones are numbered instead of named—“I don’t know if they were worried about confidentiality or if that’s because they were cheaper,” Healy said— but the numbering system carries obvious symbolism.
“It reflects an interesting period in medical history,” said Richard Veit, chair of the Department of History and Anthropology at MonmouthUniversity. “Peoples’ identities to some extentwere taken away, and they had become numbers. A lot of stigma was associated with mental illness. It tells us about atime when society was experimenting with how to take care of the mentally ill, for better or worse.”
Veit calls himself “a fan of cemeteries” for the stories they tell to future generations.
“It’s a sort of reminder of these peoples’ hard lives,” he said. “It is important to have this as a reminder for society about the way things were, so we don’t go back there again.”
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'A forgotten location'
The Monmouth County Park System supervises the site, which is formally known as State Hospital Cemetery and lies within the footprint of Big Brook Park. The county cuts the grass and clears debris. Headstones are left to fend for themselves, and many of them are crumbling, their numbers illegible (take a tour with the video atop this story).
Of the 924 plots, only two show signs of human visitation. A broken, rusting statue of the Virgin Mary sits in front of No. 379 (Dorothy Brennan, died 1944). And a bouquet of artificial flowers is planted alongside No. 427 (Rocco Reitano, died 1946). There is one modern, regular-sized headstone honoring "mother" Dorothy Henson (died 1942). But the mostly barren scene confirms that visitors are few and far between.
“It’s a forgotten location, for sure,” Healy said. “The reason people were buried there for the most part was they had no next of kin or anyone who was willing to accept the body.”
Adolph Miller fell into the latter category.
“He had issues; he was known as an outcast of the family who was never involved with his kids,” said Laible, who lives in Monroe and works at Rutgers University. “So when he passed away, my uncle and my dad’s mother probably got a call and said, ‘No, we don’t want to pick him up.’”
A few years ago, seeking to penetrate the mystery of a forebear whose name barely was mentioned by family elders, she began poking around.
“I remember looking at the 1940 census report,” she said. “He was listed as living in Plainfield. My great-grandmother wrote that he lived there because it was an embarrassment to say they were divorced.”
About five years ago, through some web searches, Laible connected him to the cemetery. She hasn’t been there yet, but plans to go in the near future and bring her father, who never knew his grandfather.
“I always wondered, where could he possibly be?” she said.
He’s in a forgotten graveyard, No. 737.
Carino’s Corner appears Mondays in the Asbury Park Press. Contact Jerry at jcarino@gannettnj.com.
