Tucked away on the sprawling, mostly abandoned grounds of the former Searcy Hospital in Mount Vernon, a small town in north Mobile County, sits a cemetery that few people even know exists. Hundreds of graves, many marked only with numbered concrete or metal stakes instead of names, hold the remains of patients who spent their final days at the state mental institution before it closed a little more than two years ago.
Retired Mobile County Probate Court records keeper Collette King has spent years trying to piece together who is buried there. She stumbled onto a trove of decades-old death certificates stored in wooden boxes in the attic of the old Mobile courthouse, some documents dating back well over a century. Cross-referencing those records with insanity case files has been slow, painstaking work, since most patients were listed with only a first and last name, no birthplace, no next of kin, and no clear paper trail connecting them to living relatives searching for answers today.
A survey of the property suggests there could be at least 740 graves, arranged in tight, deliberate rows across a remote section of the roughly 150-acre hospital campus, part of a larger 1,800-acre tract still owned by the Alabama Department of Mental Health. A local archaeologist who examined the site with university students years ago estimated the true number of burials could exceed 1,000, though only a couple hundred markers were ever formally catalogued before the fieldwork stopped. Records and interviews with former hospital employees suggest no one has been buried there since sometime in the 1940s.
The land itself carries a long and layered history. Originally home to a Civil War-era arsenal and barracks, it later held the Apache leader Geronimo as a prisoner in the late 1880s before becoming a mental health facility that served Black patients under segregation and was not fully integrated until 1969. When the 34 historic structures on the property were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, the cemetery was left off the listing entirely. The Mobile Historic Development Commission’s director, who helped prepare that original nomination decades ago, has said no one told him the burial ground existed at the time.
Even people with direct ties to the hospital say the cemetery remained largely unknown. A Mount Vernon town councilman who worked at Searcy for more than three decades, starting in the early 1970s, said he never once visited the burial ground during his career there, though he recalled hearing about it and estimated no more than a few hundred people were laid to rest on the site.
State law guarantees public access to cemeteries in Alabama, but reaching the Searcy grounds is far more complicated than visiting a typical graveyard. The property sits behind a gate patrolled by a security guard, and state officials have said access is generally limited to family members with legitimate requests, in part because of liability concerns tied to the property’s deteriorating buildings. Mental health department officials have acknowledged that detailed burial records simply were not kept during much of the hospital’s operation, leaving the identities of most of those buried there likely lost for good.
For researchers and local historians who have taken an interest in the site, time is a growing concern. The concrete and metal markers used to identify individual graves are weathering and deteriorating, and without a more complete survey, advocates worry the physical evidence of who rests at Searcy could disappear before anyone finishes the work of matching names to numbers.