A Doctor Ahead of His Time

In 1880, Dr. John Wesley Waughop became the superintendent of the state's only hospital for the mentally ill, located in what is now Lakewood. He managed the old Western State Hospital for 16 years because of his interest in the new science of psychiatry during the early age of Sigmund Freud's theories. He viewed mental illness as a treatable condition much like any other medical condition, a novel concept in some circles of the time.

Waughop and his wife were responsible for planting the rare trees, including an Empress tree from China, located around the hospital grounds. After his time at the hospital, he moved to Hawaii, where he and his son opened a medical practice.

Aging and falling into bad health, Waughop decided to return to Washington in 1903. He never made it. He died at sea aboard the S.S. Moana on Aug. 31, 1903. After his death, the name of the lake at the hospital was changed from Mud Lake to Waughop Lake in his honor for the work he did at the hospital.

Waughop left an impression on Lakewood’s history the way few can. He not only gave his name to the lake at the center of Fort Steilacoom Park, but he pioneered and helped modernize treatment of mentally ill patients.

Waughop, pronounced "Wah-op," spent his life without much notice. He was born in Illinois in 1839 and enrolled at Eureka College in 1860, the school that also taught late president Ronald Reagan. Waughop's schooling took a backseat to service in the Civil War, where he saw the bloodiest parts of the war as a surgeon’s assistant at the battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg. He spent hours holding down soldiers as doctors cut off limbs without painkillers. The process was so fast and furious that reports from the hospital note the piles of discarded limbs being cleared out with wheelbarrels.

After his discharge, he attended University of Michigan’s noted medical school and then transferred to Long Island College in Brooklyn, New York. After opening his own practice in Kansas, serving as the mayor and marrying Eliza Susan Rexford, Waughhop moved the family by wagon train to Olympia in 1871.