Until her mother’s death last year, Susanna Aquilino always believed that her grandfather had died of a heart attack.
“We were simply told that he had died of a heart attack at 39,” she said recently. “When my mother died, my father was very distraught. He started babbling out unbelievable stories about my grandfather going mad. My mother had made him keep the secret. He kept saying that my grandfather had died in an insane asylum. He seemed to believe he had been beaten and tortured.”
Aquilino could have dismissed the ramblings as a reaction to grief. But something in her father’s tone suggested a measure of truth, although neither she nor her five siblings had ever heard anything of the kind before.
“When he died, our grandmother married right away and had other children,” she said. “She closed a door on that part of her life and moved to destroy everything that reminded her of it.”
Even if she had kept papers, most would have not survived the numerous moves the family made over the years.
From her father, Aquilino learned that the man had died at a place called “Snake Hill” at the southeastern tip of Secaucus.
“My sister and I started digging,” she said.
With a little more questioning, Aquilino learned that her grandfather, Martin Henry, had worked as a cab driver in Newark during the early 1930s. He apparently struck and killed a child while driving and was not able to get over the accident. With no place else for him to go, family members committed him to the Lunatic Asylum at Laurel Hill in Secaucus, where he died at age 39 on Aug.15, 1934. The man’s wife, and later his daughter, were so ashamed of the circumstances surrounding the death that they made up a story, keeping the truth secret for nearly 70 years.
A historic place
From her home near the Jersey Shore, Aquilino began to track down some of clues to her grandfather’s demise. She learned some remarkable facts: that the institution in which her grandfather died had once been part of a mini-city located in the heart of the Meadowlands, and that it was an almost Gothic institution that had vanished by the late 1960s.
Although most residents of Secaucus know something of the Laurel Hill, many who pass by its ruins each day do not realize how magnificent an institution once stood near what is now the New Jersey Turnpike.
Only a few stone foundations remain, a mere 30 years after the walls of what many called a mini-city of the meadows came down. A single smokestack rises from where one of the last buildings fell, surrounded by reeds, weeds and the smell of the river. If one searches hard enough, a pick ax might be found, or a hammer from the days when the prisoners who were housed in a jail on the site pounded out pieces of the Palisades to build New Jersey roads. It is hard to imagine that this place was once the pride and joy of Hudson County.
Many Secaucus old-timers still call the area Snake Hill, the name by which this cropping of the Palisades was known from the 1600s until 1915, because the region was infested with snakes.
Old Bergen County, which now comprises modern Passaic and Bergen counties, acquired 200 acres in the late 1700s for a poor farm. In 1845, the new county of Hudson took on the site for its own poor house, but only after about 10 years of bickering did it do anything with the land – it began to set up county institutions on the spot. It eventually built up to seven hospitals, three churches, a prison, laundry, a firehouse, storage buildings, and even a movie theater.
“It was one of the most beautiful places in Hudson County, and perhaps the state,” said local historian Daniel McDonough last week. “The buildings here had walkways and gardens, and the entire property was appraised at $2 million in 1924. Very few people realize how truly amazing that place was. It truly was a little city of its own.”
‘Gorgeous’ structure Aquilino’s grandfather had been a patient in Laurel Hill’s lunatic asylum, which was finished in 1873 and held 140 patients. The four-storied masonry complex stood on the eastern side of the slope, balancing the original almshouse. McDonough said this facility was far ahead of its time in many ways, providing services and an atmosphere uncommon elsewhere.
“Conditions were pretty humane,” McDonough said. “The place was gorgeous. It had a wood interior and a great decor. There were cushioned seats for people to sit, and relatives could take patients outside that were not completely out of it.”
The setting around the buildings was park-like, with pathways leading through the small city and along the shore of the Hackensack River. There also were small gazebos which people could sit in shade or stay out of drizzle.
A need to know more
Aquilino and her sister searched local newspapers in Newark and in Jersey City for reports about their grandfather, and delved into the Jersey Room of the Jersey City Public Library.
“We found some information, but not a lot,” she said.
While there are old photographs of Laurel Hill and a few of the various institutions, none seem to depict the day-to-day life of residents, providing clues as to how the sisters’ grandfather’s last days were, or debunking the rumors of beatings their father seemed to believe.
By the time Aquilino got to search out her grandfather’s whereabouts, the area had become a county park with only a single smoke stack from the laundry still standing.
“I feel a part of me is missing and have always felt a bit lost somehow,” she said. “Now I’ve come to find out about my family I never knew existed.”
Once Aquilino discovered the actual details, she began to search for more information, about the place where her grandfather died and the possible place of burial. She feared she might never find the body because many people from the institution were buried in pauper’s graves.
Although the site of these graves was rediscovered recently when engineers from the New Jersey Turnpike began to prepare the land off New County Road for the new exit, records on many of those buried there are lost or not catalogued well enough to locate individuals.
She eventually found Martin Henry’s grave elsewhere, in a North Arlington Cemetery.
“My sisters had some information,” she said.
But the man and his demise largely remain a mystery still. Aquilino has been seeking to get records from the asylum, but apparently such records no longer exist, even in a county as bureaucratic as Hudson.
She went to Jersey City and to Secaucus town halls and checked out the libraries in both places, searching for clues, only to come up empty.
“We’ve contacted all kinds of people and looked through newspaper archives in the library, but we’ve come up with nothing,” she said. “We know the asylum existed, but little more.”
By the time of Henry’s death, many of the operations were already being shifted to a new hospital location at Meadowview. Years later, when Aquilino and her sister visited the facility, they soon discovered records from the old facility were no longer available.
“They told us that if any medical records ever existed, the county was allowed to destroy them after 30 years,” she said.
What they did manage to get was their grandfather’s death certificate from the county, which gave them only a bit more information than they already had. The death certificate showed that her grandfather had suffered fluid around the heart and in the lungs.
“We keep thinking someone might have worked there and told their families about what it was like,” she said. “Maybe one of the other families that had somewhere there knows more about what it was like at that place.”