Patient #125: The Forgotten Twin of Cornelius

In Cornelius Methodist Cemetery lies a weathered metal grave marker, rusted and broken, half-buried in the grass. The inscription reads:

MABLE M. EVERITT
Died AUGUST 2, 1965
Aged 86 Yrs.

She rests there alone – no family plot, no other Everitts nearby, no permanent headstone to replace the temporary marker from 59 years ago. But Mabel’s story deserves to be told.

The Twin Sisters

On a November day in 1878, twin daughters were born to Henry and Caroline Everitt in Fenwick, Michigan. They named them Minnie and Mabel. The girls were inseparable, growing up together through joy and tragedy. When the twins were only 10 years old, their mother Caroline died in Hamilton, North Dakota. Within a year, their father Henry remarried. The family eventually moved west to Oregon, settling in Cornelius where Henry became a familiar figure in the community, local newspapers mentioned him living “across the long bridge west of town,” on the Cornelius side of the bridge over Dairy Creek.

January 15, 1900

On this date, something happened that would change Mabel’s life forever. At age 21, she was committed to the Oregon State Insane Asylum in Salem through a formal legal process in Hillsboro, Washington County. Her father Henry Everitt petitioned the court. Two physicians, Dr. J.P. Tamiesie and Dr. Samuel T. Linklater, examined her and certified her as “insane” and “unable to be at large.” County Judge Louis A. Rood signed the commitment order. Washington County Sheriff William D. Bradford executed the order. And among those who assisted: her twin sister Minnie, who served as Assistant to the Sheriff, helping to process the paperwork that would take her sister away. The diagnosis: “psychosis. Imagine what that must have been like – Minnie helping to facilitate her twin sister’s commitment to the asylum.

A Brief Hope

Just three months later, on April 7, 1900, there was hope. Mabel was released on a three-month leave of absence to the care of her brother William Alfred in Roseburg, 180 miles south. William, then 28 years old, was an established businessman, proprietor of the Roseburg Steam Laundry. Perhaps with his stable income and position in the community, the family thought he could provide the care Mabel needed. But something went wrong, just two months after her release, Mabel wasn’t in Roseburg with William. She wasn’t back in Cornelius with her father and twin sister. She was back at the asylum, listed as an inmate. This time, she would not leave for a long, long time.

The Lost Decades

For the next 55 years, Mabel lived behind the walls of the Oregon State Insane Asylum (renamed Oregon State Hospital in 1913). She watched the institution transform from the era of “moral treatment” – where patients worked the farms and gardens to the medicalized psychiatry of the 1960s. She survived restraints, isolation, hydrotherapy with ice water, and the grinding monotony of institutional life.

Meanwhile, her family scattered and moved on:

• 1901: Her father Henry divorced Lucia, his fourth wife and the stepmother who had raised Mabel through her teenage years.
• 1902: William sold his laundry business in Roseburg and moved on. By 1910 he was in Portland working as a railroad engineer.
• 1902-1903: Her twin sister Minnie died suddenly of tuberculosis at age 23, just 2-3 years after serving as Assistant to the Sheriff in Mabel’s commitment. A newspaper obituary tells how Minnie attended a neighbor’s funeral on Sunday, walked home, felt fine on Monday, then came down with severe sickness Monday night and died within 24 hours. We cannot find Minnie’s grave.
• 1920: Henry died and was buried in Banks, Oregon – 10 miles from where Mabel would eventually rest, but they would never share a cemetery.
• 1920s-1940s: Her brothers William Alfred and Frederick Earl both moved to California, married, had children, built lives. William became a railroad engineer. Frederick became a farmer, then a route salesman. Both lived into their 90s.
• 1961: Brother William died in Glendale, California, age 89.
• 1969: Brother Frederick died in Los Angeles, age 92 – four years after Mabel.

There’s no evidence any of them ever visited Mabel during those long decades. No family contact recorded. No one claimed her.

The Family Pattern

Mabel wasn’t the only Everitt to be institutionalized. Her great-uncle Ira Everitt – her father Henry’s brother – had also been committed to the Oregon State Insane Asylum in 1897, three years before Mabel. Ira died there in 1914 after 17 years. His cremated remains were never claimed and are still available at Oregon State Hospital today, over a century later.

In fact, multiple men in that generation of Everitts, Ira, Michael, and Adam, were described in census records as “insane,” “idiotic,” or “of unsound mind.” There was a hereditary pattern running through the family, something we might now recognize as a genetic component to mental illness.

The Final Release

In February 1965, after approximately 55 continuous years at Oregon State Hospital, Mabel was finally “paroled.” She was 86 years old, suffering from heart disease and dementia. She was transferred to the Hillsboro Convalescent Home. She lived there for six months. On August 2, 1965, Mabel M. Everitt died of a heart attack. The informant on her death certificate wasn’t family – it was the Washington County Welfare Commission. Her parents were listed as “unknown.” She had never married. She had no children.

Someone – whether the welfare office, the funeral home, or perhaps a distant family connection – made the decision to bury her in Cornelius Methodist Cemetery. Perhaps because this was her hometown, where her father Henry had been a known resident, where the family had lived when she was committed 65 years earlier. Not in a potter’s field. Not in an asylum graveyard. She came home to Cornelius.

Why This Matters

When Mabel was committed in 1900, women were institutionalized for things we’d find shocking today: refusing marriage, reading too much, postpartum depression, epilepsy, being “too emotional,” or simply being inconvenient to their families. The “science” of the time included watching how women held their thumbs to diagnose insanity and warning against rocking chairs as a cause of female madness. We don’t know what Mabel’s actual condition was. We don’t know if she truly needed institutional care or if she was one of thousands of women warehoused because there was nowhere else for them to go. We know she was released once and it didn’t work out, but we don’t know why. Did she have a genuine psychiatric crisis? Was William unable to manage her care while running his business? Did family dynamics play a role?

What we do know is that she was a real person. She was born a twin. She lost her mother at 10. She lived through family upheaval, multiple stepfamilies, a cross-country move. And at 21, she entered an institution and spent the next 55 years there.

She deserves better than a rusting temporary grave marker with her name misspelled. This is why we research local history. This is why we preserve these stories. Because every person matters, even those the world tried to forget.

Mabel M. Everitt
1878 – 1965
Resting in Cornelius Methodist Cemetery
Not forgotten.

Research sources: Washington County commitment records (Vol 1 Pg 38), Oregon State Hospital records, U.S. Census 1900-1950, Washington County death certificates, Roseburg newspaper archives, Hillsboro newspaper archives, Ancestry.com family trees, photographs from Oregon State Archives