Bittersweet Memories

About the Book

The book will be a history of the facility, hopefully, it will be more than just a history of dates and events. It is the purpose of this book to personalize the Peoria State Hospital through the use of personal memories of the patients and staff.

A few miles from the city of Peoria, Illinois at the bottom of a beautiful bluff overlooking the Illinois river, are the remains of an old set of stairs. For more than a half-century after the turn of the twentieth century these stairs led from a train station located at the bottom of the steep hill up to the grounds of the Peoria State Hospital. This stairway, partially covered by weeds and debris, itself, is today a forgotten reminder of the once stately facility which was located there.

It is impossible to know just how many patients, nurses, doctors, workers and visitors used these stairs over the years to gain access to the hospital grounds. These stairs, depending upon what one reads or to whom one talks, were a stairway to heaven, to hell, or to somewhere in between. Only one thing is sure, everyone who climbed these stairs was profoundly affected by what they found there...

This book seeks to understand what really happened at the hospital during its fascinating history and to do so as accurately as possible. In the end, the individual reader will be allowed to draw his or her own conclusions regarding the Peoria State Hospital and the thousands of men and women who, at one time or another, called it, no matter how briefly, ''home.''

About the Author

Bittersweet Memories is a collaboration by two individuals, myself andArlene Parr. I graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree from Illinois State University in 1995, and am currently writing my Masters thesis on the Peoria State Hospital. We are both members of the Mental Health Historic Preservation Society of Central Illinois, a group that is striving to preserve the history of the Peoria State Hospital. Arlene is the director of the society, and during her 30-year career at the George A. Zeller Mental Health Center, Peoria, was the librarian and was in charge of the museum there.