In the woods above Brattleboro, Vermont, a 65-foot stone tower has stood since the 1890s. It was not built by architects or hired masons. It was built by the patients of an insane asylum, stone by stone, under the direction of their doctors who believed that breaking rocks could fix broken minds. But some patients found another use for the tower they had built with their own hands. They climbed it one last time. In 1938, officials sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers.

This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution.

• 1806: Richard Whitney dies under Dr. Perley Marsh's experimental treatments in Hinsdale, New Hampshire
• 1834: Anna Hunt Marsh dies, leaving $10,000 (over $300,000 today) to establish a psychiatric hospital
• 1836: The Vermont Asylum for the Insane opens in Brattleboro with no chains, no cells, and no fences
• 1887-1894: Patients construct the 65-foot Retreat Tower from locally quarried granite on the ridge above campus
• 1938: Tower entrance sealed after multiple patient deaths

The Brattleboro Retreat remains one of the oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Founded on the radical premise that the mentally ill deserved kindness rather than chains, it pioneered America's first patient-produced newspaper, the first swimming pool at any hospital in the world, and a campus that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. In 2016, a cemetery restoration project recovered names for the numbered graves where possible and installed a memorial marker for those whose identities were permanently lost. The tower itself was restored by volunteer stone workers in 2019. Anna Hunt Marsh never saw the asylum open. She missed it by two years. But nearly two hundred years later, her institution still treats patients on the same ground her trustees purchased with her money.

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.

Episode Summary

On September 21, 1938, a Category 3 hurricane racing northward at sixty miles an hour blindsided the wealthy summer colony of Watch Hill, Rhode Island. With no radar, satellites, or modern forecasting, residents had almost no warning before a wall of water--estimated at fifty feet high--rolled over Fort Road's exclusive Napatree Point peninsula. Forty-two people were trapped in their Victorian summer cottages. Fifteen didn't survive. Those who lived rode debris across Little Narragansett Bay, clinging to floating roof sections as waves crashed over them.

The Fort Road Massacre, as locals would call it, wiped out an entire way of life in less than an hour. Thirty-nine cottages, the Yacht Club, the Beach Club, and a bathing pavilion--all destroyed. The families who had summered there for generations never rebuilt. Seven years later, in 1945, the Watch Hill Fire District purchased Napatree Point for ten thousand dollars and made a decision that still stands: the land would remain forever wild. Today, Napatree Point is an eighty-six-acre conservation area where piping plovers nest and visitors can walk where mansions once stood.

Timeline of Key Events

September 4, 1938: Hurricane forms near Cape Verde Islands off Africa

September 19, 1938: Storm reaches Category 5 strength near Bahamas

September 21, 1938 (10:00 AM): Washington Weather Bureau downgrades storm to tropical storm

September 21, 1938 (1:00 PM): Mrs. Camp's luncheon at Weekapaug; guests note "strange yellow light" over water

September 21, 1938 (3:00-4:30 PM): Hurricane strikes Fort Road; storm surge devastates peninsula

September 21, 1938 (6:00 PM): Winds die; Fort Road has ceased to exist

1945: Watch Hill Fire District purchases Napatree Point; no rebuilding permitted

Historical Significance

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 remains the most powerful and deadly to strike the region in recorded history, killing between six hundred and seven hundred people across Long Island and southern New England. Rhode Island suffered the worst casualties. The disaster exposed catastrophic gaps in the nation's weather forecasting infrastructure--a twenty-eight-year-old junior forecaster was the only meteorologist on duty when the storm made landfall because senior staff were at a conference.

The tragedy led directly to massive improvements in hurricane tracking and warning systems that Americans take for granted today. Providence completed the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier in 1966. Coastal building codes were strengthened throughout New England. The decision to preserve Napatree Point as a wildlife refuge--made decades before such conservation efforts became common--stands as one of the first examples of managed retreat from a vulnerable coastal area. According to the Watch Hill Conservancy, the piping plover, a federally endangered species, now nests on the same barrier beach where Victorian mansions once stood.

Sources: Watch Hill Conservancy, PBS American Experience "Wake of '38", National Weather Service, Rhode Island Historical Society

190: Hazardville, Connecticut: When Gunpowder Made—and Destroyed—a Town

On January 12, 1888, nineteen-year-old Minnie Freeman stood in a one-room schoolhouse six miles south of Ord, Nebraska, teaching thirteen students their lessons on what seemed like an unusually warm winter morning. Forty degrees in January felt like spring, and her students had arrived without their heavy coats. By mid-afternoon, everything would change. An arctic front racing south from Canada at unprecedented speed—seven hundred and eighty miles in twelve hours—was about to transform ordinary classroom work into a desperate fight for survival.

When the storm struck around 2:45 PM, the wind ripped the door off its hinges and began peeling away the tarpaper roof. As temperatures plummeted from forty degrees to well below zero and visibility dropped to nothing, Minnie remembered a ball of twine she had confiscated from student Frankie Gibben that very morning. In a moment of clarity that would save lives, she tied her thirteen students together, spacing the oldest along the line with the youngest protected in the middle, and led them blindly through the whiteout toward a farmhouse she could only navigate by memory.

**Timeline of Events:**

- **Morning, January 12, 1888:** Unusually warm day (40 degrees); students arrive at Midvale School without heavy coats

- **Mid-morning:** Minnie confiscates ball of twine from student Frankie Gibben

- **2:45 PM:** Blizzard strikes with hurricane-force winds; door ripped off, roof begins tearing away

- **Late afternoon:** Minnie ties students together with twine and leads them approximately 80-100 yards to nearby farmhouse

- **Evening:** All thirteen children survive; storm continues raging

**Historical Significance:**

The Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888 claimed an estimated 235 lives across the Great Plains, with over 100 victims being children caught in schoolhouses or trying to walk home. Many teachers who kept students inside watched them freeze as fuel ran out; others who sent children home unknowingly condemned them to die in the whiteout. Minnie Freeman’s quick thinking and that confiscated ball of twine made the difference between life and death.

Within weeks, she became a national celebrity—\"Nebraska’s Fearless Maid.\" A song written in her honor sold over a million copies of sheet music, and she received more than 80 marriage proposals from strangers. Today, a Venetian glass mural in the Nebraska State Capitol commemorates her heroism, showing a young woman leading a line of children through a blizzard, the twine connecting them visible in the artwork.

**Sources:** Nebraska State Historical Society; David Laskin’s *The Children’s Blizzard*; contemporary newspaper accounts from January-March 1888.

**Word Count:** 432 words

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