California opened its first state asylum in a rented Stockton bowling alley in August 1851, with thirteen patients carried in off a ship. Two years later it moved onto a hundred acres given by Captain Charles Weber, and Dr. Robert King Reid ran it on moral treatment: clean rooms, work outdoors, not a single cell. By 1874 the women's building carried a tower over two hundred feet high, and the river pilots on the Stockton Channel steered by it.

Then the wards filled. The state could refuse nobody. Chairs went into the windowless corridors and patients were strapped into them. In 1909 California made it legal to sterilize a patient to improve his physical, mental, or moral condition, and for twenty years Stockton did more of those operations than any other hospital in the state. The first burial ground was never fully moved. A lake and a fountain sit over part of it now.

This is the story of Stockton State Hospital, of what happened to the people inside it, and of why a university teaches today on ground nobody can map.

Sources:
Gosney & Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment (Macmillan, 1929)
Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures (UC Press, 1997)
Starr, "Stockton State Hospital: A Century and a Quarter of Service," San Joaquin Historian, 1976
Ford, "An Early Occurrence of Investigative Reporting," San Joaquin Historian, 1998
California ACR No. 123 (Chesbro), 7 July 2010
Online Archive of California, Stockton State Hospital Records 1852–1994