SALEM, Oregon (AP) – Jewett Williams served in the 20th Maine Regiment in the Civil War. When he died in 1922 at an Oregon insane asylum, he was cremated and his ashes were stored and forgotten along with the remains of thousands of other patients.
With a color guard in Civil War-era uniforms present, Oregon State Hospital officials handed over Williams’ ashes to a group of motorcycle-riding military veterans for a journey across the country to his home state.
“He was a son, a brother, a husband and a father. At the end of his life, however, he was alone and institutionalized here,” Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney said at the ceremony. “When he died, nobody came. Nobody came to honor him. Nobody came to take him home. Nobody came. Until today.”
Members of the Patriot Guard Riders, a group that attends the funerals of U.S. military veterans, firefighters and police, then solemnly received the ashes, started their Harleys and began the long journey to Maine. Wearing leather vests festooned with patches describing their branches of service and American flags flapping from their bikes, the group will escort the remains in relays across America.
The ashes of hundreds of other patients were left behind, in urns embedded in a wall at a memorial on the grounds of the hospital made famous in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a film starring Jack Nicholson and adapted from a novel by Ken Kesey. It was in 2004 that Courtney, on a tour, found the ashes in corroding copper cans, stashed in a shed of more than 3,600 people who died at the Oregon State Hospital and other institutions.