Ernestine Plath's Extreme Mental Illness

Sylvia Plath's mentally ill grandmother, Ernestine Plath, was much sicker than we ever knew, a mental hospital veteran when her husband signed her into the Oregon State Hospital in autumn 1916 (see her photo in last week's post). Ernestine was then 62, diagnosed with senile dementia, and died in the hospital in 1919, and I have a copy of her hospital files including the chilling photo with the black eye.

Ready to post this week about domestic violence, I took time to consult other sources and learned:

1)  That photo probably wasn't from the day of intake. Although it's undated I'd assumed that, and thought Ernestine's husband or sons had beaten her. Hospital historian Jessica Cole told me a photographer came to the hospital every few months, and the staff lined up new patients for mugshots one after another: efficient. The black eye -- terrible in any case -- then might have come from anywhere.

2) Ernestine had lived in North Dakota from 1902 to 1905 when she was admitted to the state insane asylum at Jamestown, N.D., staying until 1910. I wanted proof of a five-year stay. I found it in the 1910 federal census listing the inmates of the Jamestown women's ward. All inmates gave their first and last names while Ernestine gave the name "Mrs. Antonio Plath." That's why she hadn't shown up in searches of that census. There was no Antonio Plath in the family. Yet Ernestine's surname and demographics matched her husband's answers to the Oregon hospital's questionnaire:

Patient ever insane before? "Yes, one time five year in Jamestown N. Dakota." First symptoms: "1905, head-ache, sleep and appetite loss, and anxious an [sic] persecution."

The Oregon state hospital could not get Ernestine's Jamestown records, and we don't have them, so we've had the illusion that Ernestine's second, documented, hospitalization was the first one, the only one, or the really big one, and that her illness was mostly from aging when it was cyclic and chronic.

Although Sylvia wasn't told about her paternal grandmother's illness, she was terrified of becoming chronically mentally ill and a charity case in state mental hospitals.

Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's Grandmother, Oregon State Hospital

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Plath, photograph c. 1916 in her file at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum"). Read about her fate here.

This is the second known photo of Ernestine Plath. The first known photo, c. 1907, I found and published in 2022. Documentation of the above is being researched and is pending.

Who?

Meet Sylvia Plath's grandfather Theodor, master-blacksmith/inventor, and his wife Ernestine, grandmother who died in the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane. These are Otto Plath's parents, from Budsin, Prussia (today, Poland). Otto got to America the year before they did.

The props of fancy chair plus classical column mean the portrait was taken in the U.S.A. where bad taste reigns in such things. I mean, our four-year-olds get studio-photographed holding golden plastic "4"s. Already approaching age 50 when Mr. and Mrs. Plath arrived in 1901, they are likely closer to 60 in this photo. The narrow necktie suggests it's after 1905. The occasion might have been their 25th wedding anniversary in 1907. Celebrating that anniversary, calling it "silver," and the 50th anniversary the "gold," is a German tradition that Sylvia references in her poem "The Applicant."

Embossed in the corner is the photographer's name, hard to read. If it says "Hale" it was Herbert A. Hale, longtime Portland, Oregon photographer, turn of the century to 1917. Enlargement reveals beneath the logo small roman letters that look like "ego" or "eco" and might say "Oregon." City directories show Theodor worked as a blacksmith in Portland in 1907 and 1908.

I think there is something of Otto Plath in the looks and stance of both parents. The photo, scanned into a public family-tree gallery, is the first I've seen of either parent. Ernestine died in Salem, the tin of her ashes finally claimed by a descendant in 2020; Theodor, buried in Oregon City, had a pauper's grave with no stone. But, very good news: In 2021 a seeker located and marked his grave.