Anna Cameron Kirkland Papers, 1832-1890, and undated

This artificial collection contains scans and transcriptions of letters by, to, and about Anna Cameron Kirkland (1817-1890) of Hillsborough, North Carolina, who was the first female patient of Dorothea Dix Hospital. More than one hundred relevant letters have been drawn from several different family papers held by the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. Although her father died at a relatively young age and was not a wealthy man, Anna was born into one of North Carolina’s most affluent and socially prominent families. Her uncle, Duncan Cameron, owned several plantations in central North Carolina, including Stagville, near Durham, and some 900 slaves. In 1835, she married Alexander Kirkland (1807-1843), son of prominent merchant William Kirkland, who did not inherit his father’s business acumen. Anna gave birth to two sons, William Alexander Kirkland (1836-1898) and Robert Strange Kirkland (1838-1899). Alexander Kirkland died of unspecified medical causes in May 1843. More than 100 pieces of relevant correspondence were unearthed among the 33,000 items in the Cameron Family Papers by UNC History PHD student Lucas Kelley in 2018. Most come from the period between Alexander’s death in 1843 and Anna’s admission to Dix in 1856. Anna’s letters, many of them to uncle Duncan Cameron and first cousin Margaret (Mag) Cameron Mordecai, reveal her deep sense of spiritual wretchedness and doom. Letters from family members about Anna express concern for her condition and need for care that cannot be provided within the family. Anna also recognized that she was unwell. Between 1846 and 1856 she would twice seek help from relatives to fund extended stays at the Western Insane Asylum in Staunton, Virginia, where she could be treated by its superintendent Francis Stribling. She was a patient there for some two years. The North Carolina Hospital for the Insane opened in February 1856. It was eventually named (1959) Dix Hospital in honor of social activist Dorothea Dix, who had lobbied legislators for the establishment of the state’s first insane asylum. Admission ledgers of Dix Hospital from 1856 to 1918, digitized and transcribed by the Community Histories Workshop and available to researchers through the Odum Institute, reveal that Anna was admitted on March 1, 1856, the asylum’s first female patient. Her admission might have been facilitated by Margaret Mordecai’s husband, George Mordecai, who had been appointed one of the first governors of the asylum. She remained there until her death thirty-three years later in 1890. The data set contains an inventory of the letters in spreadsheet form and the transcribed and digitized letters in .docx and .pdf formats, as available. These materials are arranged according to the original collections they are drawn from, then chronologically. The reproductions and transcriptions were created by Community Histories Workshop project staff.