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Sunday, April 14, 2024

This is the Place VIII: Inhabiting the Desolate Cities

 Previously: Fire, Salt, and Melted Buildings


The Old Testament is full of prophecies about a time when desolate cities will be inhabited by a remnant of God's people who will be spared from destruction.

Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah have plenty to say about cities being laid waste, rendered desolate, and subsequently built back up again - almost as if there is some pattern being revealed to us. In pondering this phenomenon, I can't help but wonder how often cycles of destruction and renewal have transpired on this earth, and more specifically, on this American promised-land. 

The photo above was taken a few years ago by YouTuber Jon Levi. It is footage of the ongoing renovation and excavation of the Salt Lake temple. In the video below, Jon interviewed a construction worker and discovered that the foundation of the building reaches down to a depth of at least thirty feet below the surface. Can you imagine the Mormon pioneers excavating such a massive hole with merely hand shovels and wagons in 1853?


The subject of this post is not the Salt Lake temple, but the prospect of undercovering extensive layers of old building foundations should pique our curiosity of what exactly happened in our recent past.

Is there an entire world covered up and hidden just below our feet?




The deeper I go down this research rabbit hole, the more I realize I don't know anything. How many lost or destroyed civilizations have existed before us? How advanced had those civilizations become? Can we really continue to believe the ambiguous supposition that our modern society is somehow more advanced than any other in history? Does society really follow a curve of upward technological progression as it marches through time? 

The Book of Mormon not only opposes this idea, it poignantly declares that civilizations rise and fall, swelling with pride like waves of the sea reaching their final crest, just before crashing to pieces on the rocks and sands of the beach. After describing the horrific acts of the 4th century Nephites, Mormon relates to his son just how quickly a society can degenerate into barbarism:
O my beloved son, how can a people like this, that are without civilization - and only a few years have passed away, and they were a civil and delightsome people. (Moroni 9:2, RE)

Nations follow the patterns of worlds, as one ends another begins, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, expanding and contracting, just as the breath that gives us life. As one nation is swept off by God's justifiable wrath, its surviving remnants are left to start anew, to build up the waste places and re-inhabit the desolate cities. Do we really know how many times this pattern has been repeated? Are we arrogant enough to assume that we have progressed through the ages to become the pinnacle of human civilization?

A friend recently pointed out to me a verse in Isaiah that describes a future time when this destructive cycle will repeat yet again, a time when wild animals will make homes in abandoned buildings:

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation, neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there, neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But the wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in there pleasant palaces. And her time is near to come, and her day shall not be prolonged, for I will destroy her speedily; yea, for I will be merciful to my people, but the wicked shall perish. (2 Nephi 10:3, RE, emphasis added)


Isaiah's preternatural description of this future age is a fitting introduction for subject of this post: insane asylums, railroads, and orphans. Below is the Territorial Insane Asylum that once stood in the outskirts of Provo:


Supposedly built in the early 1880s, this facility was used to treat the mentally ill. The original building was eventually razed and replaced with a new structure dubbed the Utah State Hospital.

The 19th century had a dark history of insane asylums in which patients were lobotomized, tortured, and confined in solidary cells. And along with that history we find a connection to railroads and orphanages, almost as if a there was a triple effort underway to repopulate a largely abandoned nation full of desolate cities.

Why were there so many orphanages and insane asylums in operation during the latter half of the 1800s? And why was the U.S. government so involved in the completion of the transcontinental railroads, subsidizing state-picked builders with tax-payer outlays for every mile of track laid?

I wrote about the corruption and inefficiencies of the Union Pacific railroad in this dated blog post, but what about Brigham Young's involvement?

It's no secret that Brigham Young profited from his contract with the Union Pacific, but was there a more pressing reason to complete the railroad to Salt Lake City? Was this yet another assignment that Brigham may have received from his Jesuit superiors to repopulate the largest abandoned city in Utah? 

Before we dive in to the history of the Territorial Insane Asylum, we'll briefly cover railroads in Utah and the orphan train phenomenon.
 

The Wannabe Railroad Magnate

According to Leonard J. Arrington in his book Great Basin Kingdom, evidence suggests that Brigham Young was scouting for railroad routes for the Union Pacific Railroad while the pioneers were crossing the plains between 1847 and 1848. Although Arrington writes about Brigham in a favorable light, he includes some interesting facts about Brigham's involvement in several Mormon railroad companies.

Arrington's book is an economic history of the Latter-Day Saints covering the period between 1830 and 1900. Brigham's involvement in the railroads is reminiscent of later Church leaders' financial manipulations  with the Saltair; using the financial prowess of the LDS church organization for personal gain. 

Arrington's assessment of the LDS railroad shows some clear patterns, revealing that Brigham and/or his son Joseph A. Young were often the directors and/or majority shareholders. Wards were often assigned to help with certain sections of track and bishops actually "called" men in their congregations to labor in Brigham's employ. And Brigham and other Church leaders would often speak of the importance of the railroads in general conferences, using the opportunity to solicit laborers in the name of God and alluding to the promises made in the temple to build up the kingdom of God on earth. 

It appears that Brigham began prepping the saints during the 1850s in anticipation of the Pacific Railroad Act that would finally be passed in July of 1862. Did he have insider knowledge? 

In 1865 Brigham bought 5 shares of stock in the Union Pacific at $1000 each, which made him a director of the company in Utah. It should be stated here that the money used for these investments did NOT come from Brigham Young's personal finances, but rather from the tithing coffers of the Church.

As Church president, Brigham was trustee-in-trust for the corporation (this was before the days of the corporation sole which began under Heber J. Grant in the early 1920s). Trustee-in-trust meant that Brigham (as trustee) could freely act in behalf of the organization (the trust) by diverting its funds as he saw fit. This was a convenient way to use Church resources as a means to buy up stock that would appear on paper under Brigham's personal name.

Between 1865 and 1868, pulpits were pounded and editorials were published preaching the necessity of the saints to support the advancement of the railroads in Utah. On May 1st of 1868, Brigham signed the contract with the Union Pacific, and by fall of that same year, another contract was signed with the Central Pacific. Each venture was purported to bring in around $2 million in revenue. Brigham was not shy about whose railroad he was building:
Work on my railroad is progressing rapidly... (Great Basin Kingdom, p. 263, emphasis added)

The following year the roads were finished, but the U.P. and the C.P. were dragging their feet in payment, which left hundreds of laborers destitute. Eventually, Brigham sent John Sharp to U.P. headquarters in Boston to negotiate a settlement. Only a partial settlement was obtained, with part of the balance being paid in an iron shipment to Salt Lake City. The Church had to sell bonds in the Utah Central Railroad to satisfy the debts to contractors and laborers, but even after all of that, it is estimated that Brigham turned a personal profit of $88,000; over $2 million in 2024 dollars.

According to one writer whom Arrington attempts to refute, Brigham's profits came at the expense of the common church members:

Whether the work paid the men who toiled, or not, Brigham and his friends were certain of their percentage and made large sums of money, while a great many of the small contractors and labouring men were utterly ruined. (Stenhouse, Rocky Mountain Saints, pp. 635-636)

After the debacle with the transcontinental railroads, Brigham turned his attention to local railroads connecting towns throughout the Salt Lake Valley. The first one, the Utah Central Railroad, was organized in March of 1869, with Brigham as president, and his son Joseph A. as superintendent. Brigham was given 200 shares, almost half of the stock of the fledgling company.

This trend continued with the Utah Southern Railroad, incorporated in January of 1871. This time the majority of the shares, 500 out of 801, went to Joseph A. Young. Later, bonds were issued to finance the company, purchased by the sale of stock. Brigham, using Church funds of course, bought up the majority of these stocks and bonds which made him the president of the company. 

By the early 1880s, several Mormon railroads were combined in the Utah Central Railway, which fell back into the clutches of the Union Pacific. But by then, Brigham was dead and his generational wealth legacy had been secured.

By the time of his death in 1877, Brigham Young was worth millions in 1870s dollars, which is hundreds of millions today. Railroads were just a small portion of his portfolio, as he was literally the owner of scores of co-ops in Utah. His position of territorial governor and trustee-in-trust for the Church allowed him to engage in a level of corporate fascism that would've impressed Mussolini. 

The video below covers many of these business ventures:



Why is Brigham's vast personal wealth important in the context of this post?

Because his remarkable business success must be attributed to more than just the fact that he was able to personally tap into the financial coffers of the Church.

Even dictators need connections and good fortune to succeed economically. The Book of Mormon refers to this kind of powerful network as Secret Combinations. 

There is some speculation that Zion's Bank (founded in 1873) was funded by the Rothschilds. If this is true, the entire economic history of the Utah Church needs to be reevaluated and rewritten.

Unfortunately, a financial link to the Rothschilds cannot be proven, not yet anyway. Documentation proving such a connection is in all probability locked away deep within the secure First Presidency vaults of Granite Mountain. But as always, there seems to be puzzle pieces lying around which begin to form a very different picture than the one we've had presented in our noble Pioneer history narratives. 

One piece of the Utah LDS church history puzzle is the building and completion of railroads, which it fits perfectly into the timeline of the mass emigration to to the West and the famous orphan trains that swept across America between 1853 and 1929.

It is estimated that around 250,000 orphans were transported to various parts of the United States during this 75-year period, which begs the question:

Where did 250,000 orphans come from and what happened to their parents?

And as to the Mormon connection we must inquire: what was Utah's role in this mass migration? Was Brigham Young acting on assignment from some superior? And why did he allow so many non-Mormon "gentiles" to settle in Utah? (For instance, according to Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, who ran the diocese of Salt Lake City, there there 10,000 Catholic immigrants in Salt Lake Valley by the late 1800s. By comparison, the entire population of Salt Lake County in 1890 was around 20,000.)

And how many of these orphans came to Utah?

The Orphan Train Movement

According to official history, the mid 1800s gave birth to thousands upon thousands of orphans. In New York City alone, 30,000 children out of a population of 500,000 people were orphaned during the 1850s. This was due, we are told, to poverty, alcoholism, or illnesses like typhoid fever, rendering parents dead or unable to care for their children.

Supposedly, so many children were running around the streets of New York City that they had to form gangs just to survive. Many adult residents referred to them as "street Arabs," "street urchins," or as Disney portrayed in Aladdin, "street rats," and looked upon them as "dangerous" threats to society. (If you pay attention almost all main characters in Disney movies are orphans.)

As the story goes, a well-intentioned Protestant minister by the name of Charles Loring Brace empathized with the orphans and started an organization called the Children's Aid Society in 1853. The organization first offered lodging to orphans and later began placing them with foster families. The idea was to move the orphans onto rural farms to get them off the streets and into family environments.

Brace was only 26 years old when he started the Children's Aid Society, and just a few years earlier he had graduated from Yale University. Interestingly, his roommate and best friend at Yale was Frederick Law Olmsted, a famous landscape architect. As it turns out, Frederick's brother was John Hull Olmsted, who graduated from Yale in 1847 and was inducted into the order of Skull and Bones as a senior. John met with an untimely death and Frederick married John’s widow and raised the children.

This makes me wonder if Frederick was Charles Brace's handler. As I have written about before, Bonesmen are often so intricately weaved throughout historical movements that it seems as if they are quietly influencing things from behind the scenes. Skull and Bones is usually careful not to induct more than one member of an influential family, which means that a brother, although uninitiated, can still be "in the know" and influential in social movements planned out by the Order. The fact that Frederick married his brother's widow is highly suspect to me that they were “keeping things in the family" - as elites often do.

(Interestingly, Frederick Law Olmsted was also the man who chose Jackson Park as the site of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and was in charge of its landscape design.)

Why would Skull and Bones be behind something as benign as placing orphans into homes? Probably because this whole orphan train project is not what they are telling us it is.

As a result of Brace's orphan placement program, thousands of orphans were soon being shipped on trains to towns all over the Midwest. (Remember the boy in Little House on the Prairie TV series who was adopted from an orphan train?)

When they arrived at train stations, children would be unloaded and displayed on a stage while being poked and prodded by potential adopters. This is where the term “up for adoption” came from. Some children were rescued by decent families, some were used for slave labor, others became indentured servants, others were given to anyone who wanted control of a child and abused in ways we may not imagine. Some were lucky enough to escape and ran away. 

We are told by our official narrators that during the 1860s New York saw an epidemic of infanticide and infant abandonment, and that the Catholic Church came to the rescue by opening up the New York Foundling Hospital. As the story goes, the main building only took a year to build, from 1872 to 1873 (so typical of construction in the 1800s). Here is a photo of the massive complex:


The Foundling Hospital rescued abandoned babies and sent older orphans to foster homes on "mercy trains." In competition with Protestant Charles Brace, they focused on placing children with Catholic families. By the early 20th century orphans had been shipped to every state in the continental U.S.



Doesn't this all sound very strange? Were that many mothers really dropping their babies off at foundling hospitals? Were 18th century populations really that high and living conditions bad enough to merit such an unnatural abandonment of children? 

Where were these orphans really coming from?


By some accounts, they were coming from Russia. By the 1880s, Russia was sending out 10,000 orphans annually into Europe, where hundreds of thousands of orphaned infants and young children were being delivered into places like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Naples, Florence, etc. I believe many of them were being shipped across the ocean to New York, and from there distributed throughout the rest of the United States on orphan trains. 

This begs the question: were all of these orphans Russian? Was it just Russia and Eastern Europe that were having this massive parental abandonment problem? 

These children, in my opinion, were left over from the previous civilization, call it Tartaria or whatever you want. Old maps depict Greater Tartary where modern Russia is, and if there was some great war that ended with the total defeat of the Tartarians, then something would have to be done with the children of the parents who either would not submit willingly to the new order or were intentionally killed to take their children. 

Remember, the victors of war always get to rewrite history, and if you're going to be successful in wiping out a people that are much further advanced than you, then you have to erase them from the historical record. And in saving only the children it is easier to erase the common memory and insert new narratives, which will be "remembered" and anchored into the group history for generations downstream. 

Any survivors of a conquered civilization must be reeducated and forced to go along with the victors, and I believe that was accomplished in the insane asylums - old Tartarian buildings repurposed as mental hospitals.

Before we explore that subject, scroll back up to the map and look at the numbers of orphans in Utah. Notice they are very few. That may have been because Utah probably didn't need orphans to repopulate its abandoned cities. Utah had one better. Utah had polygamy.

Let's think about this question: were Brigham and crew were being trained in spiritual wifery from the very beginning of the Restoration by their Masonic superiors in Boston to prepare for the planned repopulation of the Great Basin?

Did Brigham and Heber join the Church knowing full-well that they would one day orchestrate a coup, and once Joseph and Hyrum were out of the way, lead the laity of the Church out West to fulfill their Masonic orders to claim, settle and anchor an abandoned, empty Salt Lake City which had been discovered and mapped by the Jesuits? 

Of course we don't know, but to me this seems very plausible. 

The Rise of Utah's Territorial Insane Asylum

For some unexplained reason people enjoyed great mental health until the latter half of the 19th century, and then suddenly, everyone went insane. To fix this "problem," asylums started popping up all over the world. 

These massive architectural wonders were built very quickly (in one to four years typically) to house the thousands of mental patients falling prey to this new epidemic. Among the very long list of reasons why people were considered insane, the following "disorders" qualified one for commitment to an insane asylum facility:
  • Laziness
  • Novel reading
  • Opium habit
  • Over action of the mind
  • Over study of religion
  • Over taxing mental powers
  • Political excitement
  • Religious enthusiasm
  • Asthma
  • Masturbation
  • Death in the family
  • Hard study
  • Vicious vices
  • Superstition
  • Greediness
  • Grief
  • Dissolute habits
(See the full list here).

It seems as if one could've been thrown into an asylum for any reason whatsoever, and once committed, subject to any type of torture imaginable. By the early 1900s, the United States alone housed over 150,000 of these patients in asylums all over the country. Once a person was involuntarily committed to such a place, the chances of ever getting out were slim. If death didn't come from the torture one was subject to, it certainly came later from isolation, depression, or old age. 

The Territorial Insane Asylum built in the Provo area was one of these facilities. As the story goes, it was erected in four years from 1881 to 1885. It was built to accommodate 60 patients deemed "insane" by the Utah Territory, allegedly because the original asylum built in 1870 in Salt Lake City was getting overcrowded. Of course, there are no photos of this original asylum available to view for comparison.

In February of 1880, the Territorial legislature passed an "Act to Establish a Territorial Insane Asylum," with an appropriation of $25,000 to be used for the first phase of construction. A Board of Directors was created with Joseph F. Smith (second counselor in the first presidency at the time) as acting chairman.

As usual, when it comes to the erection of buildings like this, finding any details on actual construction is like finding a needle in a haystack. However, after searching the internet high and low, I found yet another obscure master's thesis, published by the University of Utah in 1948. This one was written by Charles Robert McKell, and is entitled History of the Utah State Hospital, Provo.

Mr. McKell's thesis is an inquiry about the treatment of the mentally ill throughout the history of the Territorial Insane Asylum, but he does briefly cover its construction. Unfortunately, his only source is an article published by The Daily Tribune on July 15th of 1885. As the story goes, only the northern half of the southern wing of the building was built between 1881-1885, here is how the author of the article describes it:
The building as it now stands is but the north half of the south wing of the Asylum as it will be when the whole structure shall finally have been completed, which when done will have a west frontage of 640 feet, with 4 L's 108 feet long, three stories and a basement, besides a small building facing the street. That part of the structure now finished has a west front of 152 feet, and a south front of of 108 feet. The basement story is of heavy rock masonry, and the superstructure of a light colored brick. With its numerous windows in three stories looking out upon the town, and its artistic roof, with cupolas surmounting it, the Asylum has quite an imposing appearance. (See McKell, p. 50)

As to the small building facing the street, it is important to realize that in 1885 that street is pictured as a long dirt road. Consequently, we are expected to believe that construction workers (whoever they were) used nothing but horse-drawn wagons with wooden wagon wheels to haul all construction materials to the job site on a dirt road that would've become a muddy mess with any amount of snow or rainfall. 

In addition to dirt roads, the facility was located miles from the populated city of Salt Lake, separated from town by a large high water table, and in close proximity to a dump. A strange place indeed to build a "hospital." 

Here is a photo of this initial structure (finished in 1885) sitting at the edge of the foothills:


Below is an image of the front of the building as viewed from the long dirt road in 1900 (the entire structure was finished in 1892 according to the narrative). As you can see, the two areas look nothing alike, appearing to be two completely different buildings photographed in two completely different areas:

As you can see in this image, the mountains in the background appear much larger and the ground leading up to the building appears much flatter. In the first image we see barren ground and in the second image established trees, some of them looking much older than the 15 year time lapse presented in the narrative.

Below, in this color photo, we see a landscape that looks more like the first image (color suggesting a newer image), yet with much smaller trees than the 1900 image, and possibly set up on a terrace:


Regardless of the photographic anomalies, the official construction narrative of this building is perhaps the most lacking in detail of all the buildings I've blogged about so far. We are literally given nothing but a time lapse of four years from start to finish of the first wing, and then 8 more years to complete the entire building (completely finished in 1893). 

No construction company is named, nor any general contractor mentioned. There is no mention of how many men it took to construct the building, no mention of who manufactured the millions of bricks it required, or which massively equipped kiln the bricks were fired in, and how they were transported to the jobsite (obviously on horse-drawn wagons), or what group of skilled masons actually laid them. 

We are given no details of the initial excavation and foundation work: whether men with hand shovels dug out the entire foundation of whether a steam shovel was available at that time. No mention whether railroad tracks already existed or were somehow laid through the swamp lands leading to the facility. And we get no information about the purpose for the intricate work and detail that was put into the cupolas (dome-like towers) or what company was hired to construct them.

We are given nothing except the names of the facility superintendent and two architects. The superintendent named was not even a construction superintendent, but rather the first superintendent of the insane asylum. His name was Dr. Walter R. Pike. 

The first architect mentioned in the narrative was John H. Burton. Burton was "self-trained" in architectural design, as his educational training is simply "unknown." And not only was he self-taught, but he
must have learned very quickly at a very young age, because by the time construction began on the asylum he was only 24 years old. 

We are told Burton was shot and killed by Alfred H. Martin in 1887, at the young age of 30. He met this untimely death six years before the asylum was finished, and another architect had to take over. His familiar name is Richard K.A. Kletting, who is credited for designing the Utah State Capitol building, the Saltair, and a host of other buildings in Salt Lake City. Kletting was only 29 years old when he took over the insane asylum project for Burton, as he was also supervising the concurrent construction of the Saltair. (Do you see any problems with this story?)

As you may recall from earlier posts, we often see in these fishy narratives that the original young and inexperienced architect dies prematurely before the structure is finished. We saw that in the narrative of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and coming up in future posts, we'll cover a few other very famous buildings on temple square where they tell us that architects died before the building project was completed. This, as I have stated before, is one pattern that elites (or AI) use to signify in their code when a building is from the old world. Another pattern is of course the fire narrative.

Finally, we get to the one single mention of a contractor, and of all the contractors one could mention, the narrative chose the plumber. This reference is found in The Daily Tribune article quoted in Mr. McKell's master's thesis. It was claimed by Salt Lake plumbers that the plumbing in the ("brand new") building was "defective" and would have to be redone within a year. But the article asserts that the statement was "founded in malice," and boasts that the man who did the plumbing was a "competent and highly recommended mechanic from the East." 

And that's all we get; just some unnamed "mechanic" from back East.

Supposedly, large water pipes were installed running up the mountain which brought water down from a natural spring, and by the time it reached the facility the pressure was 100 PSI. The building was heated with a "75 horsepower steam boiler" and illuminated by "thirty-two incandescent lights" powered by "a 19 horsepower Brush dynamo electric machine." 

To provide facilities to those 60 "insane" patients it appears Utah legislators spared no expense to ensure their comfort and care. But, as you will soon find out if you watch the videos at the end of this post, the patients were not treated well at all. Nor were any patients incarcerated in asylums (in any state of the Union) treated with any decency during this dark era.

I don't believe there is any way Utah pioneers could have built this castle-like structure in only four years, miles from what was then civilization, in the middle of a swamp, using horse-drawn wagons to transport materials across muddy dirt roads, and then hoisting massive multi-ton blocks of stone up to heights of 132 feet with ropes and pulleys. My sentiments are shared in the words of Wilson from Home Improvement, "I don't think so Tim!"

Now for the next ridiculous part. In 1937 we are told that a massive recreation area was added to give the patients a chance to get out and enjoy some sunshine. So they built (in only one year) a giant castle-amphitheater that looks as ancient as Stonehenge, and during the Great Depression no less. Because, that makes sense.

Here it sits in all its glory:




These pictures do not do this thing justice, because this place is a massive stone complex, with doors leading to multiple passageways, and layer after layer of perfectly laid stone walls. 

We are told that we can thank FDR and his New Deal for this stone colosseum, because it was part of some 200 building projects in Utah taken on by the WPA, or the Works Progress Administration. This government agency supposedly employed millions of workers all over the United States to construct public works projects during the Great Depression. 

One of those projects was the Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1936. If you've ever wondered about the official narrative of that massive project, the video below will most certainly give you reasons to question it:


Ironically, we are told that for a decade after the Provo Territorial Insane Asylum's castle-amphitheater was built, it wasn't used much by hospital residents because there were no restrooms built into the design and construction. This is an unbelievable oversight which destroys the credibility of the official narrative. Watch the video below for more about its history and for a visual perspective of how massive it really is:



The Territorial Insane Asylum changed its name to the Utah State Mental Hospital in 1903 and in 1927 dropped the word "mental" and stuck with the much more benign sounding Utah State Hospital.

The old (and amazing) building was eventually razed and a modern (cube-looking monstrosity) was built in its place. Jon Levi, who made the very informative video below, believes it was built right on top of the old foundation. He came to this conclusion after interviewing an employee/historian of the Utah State Hospital and doing a boots-on-the-ground investigation of the premises:



So what do I think this building really was?

I believe it was a Tartarian (or whoever the past civilization was) healing center. The reason it was built far away from town (as many asylums were) may have been because the true architects were looking for converging points of telluric (earth) energy, or ley lines. There is something about these geometric points that create an atmosphere of high resonance, and thus, healing. The building being divided up into small rooms and large wings suggests that it might have been an actual hospital of some sort. 

Here, in the supposed drawing by the architects, we can see the 600-foot-long corridor that spans the wings of the entire structure:



The idea of having such a long corridor may have been to intersect one of these points that is drawing telluric energy. Of course, this is only a theory and cannot be proven. The truth is, we do not know what the past civilization built these asylums for, but I highly doubt they used them to incarcerate the mentally "insane."

Only a barbaric and primitive society would forcibly kidnap, incarcerate, and torture people who do not fit the mental mold of their peers. The long list of reasons for committing a 19th century person to an insane asylum were so ridiculous and general, that it seems much more plausible to me that the so-called "insane asylum" was just a cover word for these facilities being repurposed as POW camps for survivors of the previous civilization reset. 

What better way to erase an entire historical epoch than to literally purge it out of the few surviving minds of those who actually lived it, and to kidnap, reeducate, and redistribute their children. 

The Kearns - St. Annes Orphanage

Pertinent to our subject is the narrative of the orphanage named above. It was first known as St. Ann's orphanage, established in 1891 by Catholic Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, the same priest who headed up the Catholic diocese in Salt Lake City and "built" the Cathedral of the Madeleine

The story of St. Ann's Orphanage is a mirror image of the Cathedral of the Madeleine. It began, we are told (along with did the cathedral), as a mere adobe building, gifted by the Catholic Church to the Sisters of the Holy Cross who ran the orphanage. Just as the orphans were beginning to outgrow the abode building, Bishop Scanlan just happened to find and purchase a larger lot for a future orphanage.

After securing a $55,000 donation from Park City mining magnate Thomas Kearns, Scanlan hired Carl M. Neuhausen, the same German architect who helped him build the cathedral, and together they constructed the orphanage in just one year, from 1899 to 1900 - just in time to begin construction on the cathedral.

And to top it all off, Neuhausen promised Scanlan that he would offer his services for free. 

And again, as with the Cathedral, we have no record of any construction workers, no contractor named, no mention of the source of the brick or stone, or any other morsel of detail. Just a priest, his trusty architect, and a few nuns. Together, they built this magnificent structure:



I did find some newspaper articles that provide some curious information about the construction of this building. The first one, published by The Salt Lake Herald on June 20th of 1889, declares that a contractor offered to donate $10,000 worth of foundation work (which included furnishing stone), but the paper is cut off before it reveals the man's name. The other article is not an article at all, but rather an add for a contractor named Peter Marron, who was apparently in need of work. It was published by The Intermountain and Colorado Catholic in September of 1900. 

The add boasts that Peter was the builder of St. Ann's Orphanage and the D.F. Walker Building, and had laid the foundation of the Kearns mansion. My question for Peter is why would he need more work when he was in the middle of building the Kearns mansion? And if Peter was really as skilled as his resume insists, then logic tells us that a contractor of his caliber would not have to post an add in the newspaper to find work.  

Marron's name is not mentioned at all in any of the other official histories of the buildings mentioned in the add. According the narrative, Scanlan and Neuhausen built the orphanage, not Peter Marron.

These are the types of anomalies you find when you begin researching old buildings, often leaving one with far more questions than answers. 

One Final Piece of the Puzzle: Incubator Babies

Did you know that human beings used to be on display at world's fairs and expositions? The first babies were put on display at the 1896 Berlin exposition by Dr. Martin A. Couney, the "incubator doctor." The fee to see the incubators was $1.00.


 

As the story goes, Couney was a German-born pediatrician who specialized in neonatology. He invented incubators as a remedy for the supposed epidemic that rocked the 19th century: infant death from premature birth. Apparently, 36% of all infant deaths were caused by this condition. 

We are told that Couney's own daughter was born premature, and only survived into adulthood because of his invention of the incubator. Babies were put on display up until the 1940s, and were shown at New York City's World's Fair, the Omaha Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the Buffalo Exposition and the Chicago World's Fair, to name a few.

This is a nice story 'n all, but where in the heck did all these babies come from? What kind of parents would allow their infants to be put on display (and charged admission for) at a world's fair? 

According to the March of Dimes, as of 2022 only 1 in 10 babies were born prematurely in the United States - 10% is quite a jump down from 36% a hundred years ago. Was it really this high or was something else going on? 

Was this just another repopulation scheme? Was eugenics at play here? Were these babies the offspring of assigned breeders, to be raised in orphanages and shipped out on orphan trains? Is there more truth than fiction to Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, in which babies are artificially created in a lab, brought to a "hatchery," and then divided into predetermined social classes?

What was really going on in America 125 years ago? 

There are no orphanages today. Parentless children are placed in foster care, and there is no need of government facilities to house overabundances of orphaned children. This seems strange when our population far exceeds the numbers that 18th century Americans were working with. Shouldn't we have more orphans today?

Again, official his-story is not making sense. Let's look at it from an alternative vantage point. 

What makes sense to me is that some kind of reset event happened in the 19th century, leaving cities abandoned and populations decimated. Those who emerged the victors/survivors after the reset needed to repopulate the abandoned cities, and build a usable infrastructure to connect those cities, or find one that already existed. 

Parents from the old civilization that wouldn't go along with the victors were dealt with in insane asylums, their children were kidnapped and gathered into orphanages and sent to labor on farms via orphan trains. Breeders were selected, or artificial means were used to produce parentless babies that could be used for future repopulating, and railroads were constructed to make it all feasible.

Have you ever wondered why it only took six years to build the transcontinental railroad that went from Council Bluffs, Iowa to San Francisco? This seems extremely fast when were talking about all the work to level and compact the ground (done with horse-drawn wagons and shovels), and of course to blast out tunnels through mountains. When it is all said and done, laying the track is the easiest part. My question is this: were the tracks already here and covered in dirt from a mud-flood event and did our people just simply uncover them?:


 
In the timeline allotted, this makes much more sense. Here is the map of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Follow the green line:


Notice that the railroad could not have been completed without Utah being a willing participant? And it only took Brigham Young one year to complete? And even more suspicious is the fact that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were "built" up faster than any other cities in the West?

San Francisco is perhaps the biggest smoking gun when it comes to the Old World. It was said to have been built by gold miners during the 1840s and 50s, yet most of the mining camps were 100 plus miles away from the city. That makes no sense at all. In my opinion, the railroad needed to be completed to repopulate, not build up these two cities. 

A great book on this is Jon Levi's Evidence of the Old World, in which he lays out a logical case against why San Francisco could not have been built out in the timeframe allowed in the narrative.

In my next post we'll be heading to Temple Square to take a look at the Assembly Hall, and the "Old" and "New" Tabernacles. 

In the meantime, here are some videos with more detail about insane asylums. 

These two go over the treatment of mental patients in Utah's asylum:




Here is one on orphan trains:


And this one is about incubator babies; apparently "Dr." Couney wasn't a doctor at all:


And here is one about how Cabbage Patch Kids may have been a propaganda campaign to explain incubator babies:



And here is one about insane asylums:


1 comment:

  1. Thanks for doing these. Really eye-opening.

    Used to live in Provo. Lotta weird buildings in Provo. If you're down that way, go explore downtown sometime. And explore the Provo City Library, and consider why there is a floor that is only reachable by an elevator, in the old half of the building.

    And near there, a long drive on a mountain road, if you know where to stop there is an old castle like structure. Not near anything else really. The history we were told is not true.

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