Bryce historian visits our class today

Certain portions of UA's Bryce Hospital are being restored.

Today Steve Davis, long-time historian for Bryce Hospital, will visit our class before we head over to the University's radio station for an interview about our December 3 music video "world premier."

I'd hoped that the students would have a chance to visit Bryce, which opened in 1861, before the semester ended. But it is presently undergoing repair following its recent transfer to the University. At least Davis can share with us some of the things he might have shared if we had been able to see it up close.

Almost a year ago, Davis kindly gave me and Dr. John Beeler of the History Department a tour of this facility, which sits on UA's campus. I can still remember standing in the dome, seeing far over into Northport and beyond, wondering what it was like the day the Union soldiers arrived to torch the campus in April 1865. I could see the President's Mansion from the dome and am not surprised that, as the story goes, the wife of the University's then-president descended the narrow corridor of stairs from that very room and high-tailed it across campus to save the mansion. As I prepare to teach the Civil War in my "American Civilization to 1865" survey class, I wonder what it must have felt like for the enslaved people in the area to know that they would soon be "free."

Bryce's history goes beyond the antebellum period. In fact, it offers opportunities to keep learning about leisure activities in an urbanizing world. The students are aware that as Americans began to work by a clock and not the sun, they made time to also play. Some attended baseball games. Some went to vaudeville houses. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, some listened to the radio and went to the movies.

During last year's tour, Davis showed us a theatre in Bryce where first-run movies were shown. Indeed, if you wanted to see a recently-released motion picture at the turn of the century, lucky Tuscaloosans  may have first seen it at Bryce. As I walked around the theatre and its peeling walls, I recall it reminded me of the theatre in my elementary school in Miami, although with fancier accents.

Author Harriet Beecher Stowe

I am personally looking forward to Davis' talk because we recently read about how Clarence King, the U.S. geologist who mapped the West for the U.S. government, had a nervous breakdown. Also, the students in my survey class are presently learning about how Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin that Abraham Lincoln once quipped "started" the war,  once suffered from "melancholia." So did her husband. According to Jean Fritz, author of Harriet Beecher and the Beecher Preachers, which my survey class is reading, one antebellum treatment for depression was taking cold baths at resorts. I welcome learning more about mental health during the nineteenth century and how people who faced such challenges were treated at Bryce.

Perhaps Davis will also share more about Charles Kilgore, the Bryce engineer who once lived in a house near the hospital's campus. Earlier this semester, the students and I visited the former site of this house, which opened the door to co-ed housing at UA.