Brattleboro, Vermont: The Asylum Tower Holding a Century of Secrets

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.

Timeline of Events:

• 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

Historical Significance:

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.

Sources: Brattleboro Reformer archives, Vermont Public Radio, National Register of Historic Places documentation, Brattleboro Retreat institutional records, Atlas Obscura.

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