Julaine Farrow Museum

The Julaine Farrow Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin preserves the fascinating history of the Winnebago Mental Health Institute (WMHI), one of Wisconsin’s oldest mental health institutions originally known when it opened in 1876 as the Northern State Mental Hospital for the Insane. Located inside the former superintendent’s residence on the WMHI campus, the museum offers visitors a rare look into more than 150 years of mental health care, medical history, and daily life at the facility. The museum was created through the efforts of Julaine Farrow, a longtime WMHI nurse and unofficial historian who spent decades collecting photographs, documents, and artifacts to preserve the institution’s story.

Inside the Julaine Farrow Museum, visitors can explore 10 rooms across two floors filled with historic objects, photographs, furniture, and exhibits documenting the evolution of patient care, diagnosis, treatment methods, and hospital operations. Exhibits include recreated historic spaces such as a medical superintendent’s bedroom, hydrotherapy treatment room, pharmacy, and surgery room (with an original Resusci Anne CPR manikin cast from the death mask of an unknown French girl), along with displays highlighting the everyday experiences of patients and staff throughout WMHI’s history. The collection provides a unique perspective on how approaches to mental health treatment changed from the late 1800s through the modern era, including the practices of bloodletting, shock therapy, and lobotomy.

Don’t miss the disturbing collection of objects removed the bodies of patients, the story of the impostor superintendent who should have been a patient, and the story of Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK who underwent a devastating lobotomy in 1941 at the age of 23, and spent the rest of her life incapacitated in Wisconsin until her death in 2005.

The museum also documents the story of the cemetery in the woods of Asylum Point Park nearby where 244 former patients of the hospital are buried.

For travelers interested in Wisconsin history, medical history, unusual museums, and offbeat attractions, the Julaine Farrow Museum is one of Oshkosh’s most distinctive cultural destinations. The volunteer-operated museum offers guided visits that reveal stories rarely found in traditional history museums, including the people who lived and worked at WMHI and the changing attitudes toward mental health care in Wisconsin.

Open to the public from February through October on Thursdays from 1:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. The museum also accepts scheduled appointments outside regular hours.