Mental Health Institute Cemetery

The Mental Health Institute Cemetery in Mount Pleasant, Henry County, Iowa, served as the burial ground for many patients who died at the Mount Pleasant Mental Health Institute (originally the Iowa Lunatic Asylum and later known as the Iowa State Insane Asylum or Mount Pleasant Hospital for the Insane), Iowa’s first public psychiatric facility. Construction of the Kirkbride-plan hospital began in 1855, and it opened in early 1861 on a campus that eventually shared grounds with the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility. Located in the eastern section adjacent to the active Forest Home Cemetery, the inactive cemetery primarily held unclaimed or indigent patients during the institution’s long history of overcrowding and evolving treatments. Early graves were marked only by simple numbered metal stakes without names or dates; these were later removed, leaving an open grassy field now distinguished by a single collective memorial monument inscribed “Life for the Living and Rest for the Dead: In Memory of our Patients Buried Here.” The facility closed in 2015, preserving the cemetery as a quiet testament to the history of state institutional care in Iowa.