So when was the Williamsburg Asylum built? Can you give references
for this and the Richmond prison?

Thanks,
suzanne


>Lyle Browning wrote:
>
>>snips happen<
>
>>what got the ball rolling with Berkeley was the somewhat arrogant
>>insistence on that typically American need to demonstrate "firstness" of the
>>New Englanders, not the Pilgrim mythology with which I agree with
>>Eric that the
>>Pilgrim/Puritan images predominate. Lots of firsts are steamrolled
>>by the later
>>arrivals.
>
>Lyle's right.
>
>Yesterday, on NPR, some Philadelphia intellectual repeated the erroneous
>claim that the "first penitentiary in America" is located there.
>
>Sorry.
>
>Latrobe's Virginia penitentiary at Richmond was already a quarter-century
>old when the Philadelphia prison was built. But Virginia had the decency to
>demolish the first penitentiary in America after it became obsolete. So
>Philadelphia is left with a crumbling old dungeon that until recently
>housed prisoners.
>
>That's not the only Yankee false claim of primacy.
>
>I am constantly annoyed by claims that New England mental hospitals were
>"first," as in the Discovery of the Asylum. I suppose they never heard of
>the one in Williamsburg, which has been reconstructed as a gallery.
>
>Silly Northern claims of primacy generally result from the fact that Yankee
>schoolmasters controlled the market for history textbooks during the
>Federal period.
>
>Ned Heite
>Delawarean by birth
>Virginian by curious accident
>
>
>
>                Ned Heite  ([log in to unmask])
>***************************************************
>*  A young lass with a bucket of waste            *
>*  attempted to hurl it in haste.                 *
>*  Bits of cabbage and pumpkin                    *
>*  blew back on this bumpkin,                     *
>*  missed the compost, and splashed in her face!  *
>***************************************************