Individual Details

1930 Census. Norman Twp, Cleveland, OK
Central Oklahoma State Hospital (mental hospital)
Leota Dalley, patient, age 26, Single, b. OK, parents, b. TX

The first structure on the hospital site actually was a school for women opened in the late 1800s. High Gate Academy couldn't compete with the nearby University of Oklahoma, and in 1895 it was sold to the Oklahoma Sanitarium Co. Mental patients who until that time had been sent by train to a facility in Illinois could now be treated at the Norman institution “for violent insane,” as a description on the facility's front gate stated.

In 1899, sanitarium officials hired David W. Griffin, a psychiatrist from North Carolina. “He saw that the word ‘insane' was on the gates, and he personally chiseled that word off,” Crosby said.

Griffin would become superintendent in 1902, a position he would hold until 1950. The sanitarium was sold to the fledgling state of Oklahoma, and in 1915, the legislative “Lunacy Bill” created several state asylums, including facilities at Fort Supply, Vinita and Norman. The Norman site became known as Central State Hospital, although numerous accounts still referred to it as “Central State Hospital for the insane.”

Patient populations at the Norman hospital grew, reaching 3,000 in the 1950s. At times, conditions reported there, as at many similar institutions of the era, were grim, with overcrowding, inadequate heating and cooling and use of electric and insulin shock therapy, sterilizations, lobotomies and other approaches now considered inhumane. Patients might remain there for months or years.

Beginning in the 1960s, medical approaches to treating the mentally ill evolved, and laws and standards of care with them. “Deinstitutionalization” began to wind down the era of huge residential mental facilities, taking much of the expansive Central State Griffin Memorial Hospital, as it was renamed in 1953, with it.

By 1990, only 245 patients remained at Griffin Memorial, which no longer needed the comprehensive and self-sustaining infrastructure it once had. Today, Griffin's patient capacity is only 120, and stays are measured in weeks or days.

Birth	3 Aug 1903	Oklahoma
Death	16 Feb 1933	Oklahoma

Father	George Marshall Dalley (1875 - 1941)
Mother	Minnie Augusta Speaks (1881 - 1968)
Sibling	Dennis Dalley (1899 - 1900)
Sibling	Pansy B. Dalley (1900 - 1968)
Sibling	Cecil D. Dalley (1902 - 1985)
Sibling	Violet Dalley (1905 - 1997)
Sibling	Clifford Coy Dalley (1907 - 1976)
Sibling	Malacha Dalley (1910 - 1996)
Sibling	Juanita Alicia "Dot" Dalley (1912 - 1980)