Of Grave Importance: The Restoration of Institutional Cemeteries

More than one million people died in American asylums and institutions designed to care for people who had mental illness or developmental disabilities. To protect the privacy of patients or their families, many display no names. Patients were buried by number, in the final act of institutional depersonalization. Row upon row of numbered stones or cast iron markers are all that is left for the thousands and thousands of people buried in such cemeteries. This is a story of renewal and restoration of the dignity of the unnamed dead.