In 1891, the first twenty-five patients stepped off a train and walked into the Vermont State Asylum for the Insane in Waterbury, a sprawling brick-and-stone campus built along a ridge above the Winooski River. The facility was supposed to heal broken minds through fresh air and structured labor. Instead, it grew into something the entire state whispered about -- a place so defined by confinement that saying someone "ought to go to Waterbury" became shorthand for madness itself.

This episode traces the full arc of the Waterbury asylum, from its founding under Governor William P. Dillingham through the decades of overcrowding that packed 1,728 patients into wards designed for far fewer. It follows the rise of Dr. Eugene A. Stanley, the superintendent who opened patient records to University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont -- a program that cataloged more than 6,000 Vermonters by bloodline and targeted Abenaki, French-Canadian, disabled, and low-income families for sterilization.

Timeline of Key Events:

1763: Waterbury chartered by Governor Benning Wentworth, named after Waterbury, Connecticut.

1891: Vermont State Asylum for the Insane opens; first 25 patients arrive from Brattleboro.

1925: Henry Perkins launches the Eugenics Survey of Vermont at UVM, with fieldworker Harriett Abbott documenting over 60 families.

1931: Vermont passes Act 174, "A Law for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization." At least 253 Vermonters sterilized through 1957; two-thirds were women.

2011: Tropical Storm Irene floods the hospital; 51 patients evacuated. The facility never reopens.

2021: Vermont House votes 146-0 to formally apologize for state-sanctioned eugenics on the 90th anniversary of the sterilization law.

Historical Significance:

The Waterbury story reaches far beyond one institution. It reveals how state power, medical authority, and pseudoscience combined to strip reproductive rights from hundreds of Vermonters -- many of them indigenous Abenaki families who hid their identity for generations to survive. Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Abenaki has spoken publicly about his grandmother changing her name three times to escape the state's eugenics lists. Meanwhile, on Perry Hill above the old campus, an ongoing search has revealed that the 1991 memorial marker for 19 deceased patients was placed in the wrong location. The dead are still waiting to be found.

The 2021 legislative apology, championed by Rep. Tom Stevens of Waterbury and passed unanimously, marked Vermont as one of the first states to formally reckon with its eugenics history -- but the scars on Abenaki families and other targeted communities remain.

Episode Summary

In the deep forests of Hancock County, Maine, there's a place that time forgot--Riceville, a company town that once thrived around a tannery on Buffalo Stream. For over a century, whispers have circulated about a plague that supposedly wiped out the entire population overnight, with tales of bodies in the streets and a mass grave hidden somewhere in the woods. The truth is far more human, and perhaps more unsettling: Riceville died not from disease, but from a single catastrophic fire and the cold economics that followed.

At its peak in 1890, Riceville was home to 136 residents. Workers peeled bark from hemlock trees and processed it into tannin for the leather industry. The community had a general store, a boarding house, and a schoolhouse where children learned their letters. Some accounts even mention a baseball team. But every soul in Riceville depended on one employer--the tannery.

Timeline of Events

1879: F. Shaw and Brothers establishes a bark extract works in Township 39, Hancock County, Maine.

1883: F. Shaw and Brothers collapses with $8.5 million in debt. The Riceville operation continues under creditor management.

1896: Buzzell and Rice Tanning Company purchases the facility and upgrades it to a full tannery processing buffalo hides.

1898: James Rice and his brothers Francis X. and John take full control, forming Hancock Leather Company. The town is officially named "Riceville" and receives a post office.

December 30, 1906: A lantern explodes in the roll house, sparking a fire that destroys the tannery, sawmill, engine house, and multiple outbuildings.

1910: Census records show zero residents remaining in Township 39.

Historical Significance

Riceville's story illuminates a pattern that repeated itself across industrial America: company towns built around single industries that could vanish overnight when that industry failed. The Shaw Brothers alone operated 39 tanneries across Maine that eventually closed. Communities from Kingman to Grand Lake Stream shared similar fates.

What makes Riceville distinctive is the legend that grew in its absence. The plague narrative didn't appear in any historical record until nearly a century after the town's abandonment--most prominently when the Bangor Ghost Hunters made Riceville their first investigation around 2000. Their director, Harold "Bubba" Murray, admitted in a 2009 Bangor Daily News interview that despite years of searching, "We were told about a cholera epidemic, a plague... but we were never able to confirm anything."

The ghost story persists because Riceville left almost no records behind. Most documents likely burned with the tannery. The town was never incorporated--just a numbered township in unorganized territory. When historical gaps exist, imagination fills them, preferring plague and mystery to the mundane tragedy of unemployment.

Today, determined visitors can still reach the site via logging roads from Milford, Maine. They'll find stone foundations, a fenced cemetery with unreadable headstones, and the ghosts of roads running north along Buffalo Stream. What they won't find is evidence of mass death--just what remains when a town loses its reason to exist and the forest takes it back.

I have covered a lot of tragedies on this show, but this one hit different. George Gustavus lost his wife and his twelve-year-old son when a seventeen-foot storm surge destroyed his home during the 1938 hurricane. He was pulled from the water half a mile away. And that same night--still soaking wet, still grieving--he climbed back up the lighthouse tower and helped restore the beacon. The light at Prudence Island has never gone dark since. Some stories remind you what duty really means.