0:03 [SPEAKER_01]: you're standing on Route 100 in Waterbury, Vermont, in November, 1891. 0:08 [SPEAKER_01]: The air smells like wood smoke, incoming snow. 0:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Behind you, the last maples pulled on to their copper leaves. 0:20 [SPEAKER_01]: A head on a hill that commands the entire valley, workers are laying the final stones on a building that will change everything. 0:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The Vermont State Assylum, for the insane. 0:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Four stories of red brick, 200 windows catching the afternoon light, Italian eight towers that look from certain angles, almost welcoming. 0:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The towns people gather to watch, some sea jobs, a hundred positions, maybe more. 1:00 [SPEAKER_01]: a few see something else. 1:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Their neighbors children, their aging parents, the veteran who hasn't been right since the war. 1:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Here's what almost nobody sees. 1:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The building will define Waterbury for the next 120 years. 1:19 [SPEAKER_01]: It will employ generations or traumatize others. 1:24 [SPEAKER_01]: And for most of that time, the town will do something remarkable. 1:29 [SPEAKER_01]: They'll learn to look right past it. 1:32 [SPEAKER_01]: To live alongside one of Vermont's largest institutions, as if it barely exists. 1:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history. 1:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world. 1:52 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Shane Waters. 1:53 [SPEAKER_01]: It a day where exploring how a town learned to speak about the institution that defined it. 2:01 [SPEAKER_01]: We're heading to Waterbury, Vermont. 2:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Population, 5,200, 2:07 [SPEAKER_01]: a town that's been many things, a farming community, a railroad hub, the home of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, but for 120 years it was something else, something harder to talk about, it was in a silent town, the story of how Waterbury learned to name that reality out loud, how our community moved from silence to acknowledgement, that's what we're 2:39 [SPEAKER_01]: October 12, 1891. 2:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The morning train from Bratoporo pulls into the waterberry station, carrying the asylum's first patients, 25 mid-and-women. 2:53 [SPEAKER_01]: The town watches, from store windows, from the common. 3:00 [SPEAKER_01]: But the historical record shows something fascinating. 3:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Almost no one writes about it. 3:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Not in waters, not in diaries. 3:11 [SPEAKER_01]: The Waterbury record runs a brief notice about the asylum's opening. 3:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Then returns to grain prices in town meeting minutes. 3:22 [SPEAKER_01]: The silence starts immediately. 3:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Inside the asylum, Dr. Henry Lawson, the first superintendent, is establishing what he calls 3:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The phrase sounds enlightened for 1891, and in some ways it is. 3:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Patients work in the gardens, they attend church surfaces in the chapel. 3:47 [SPEAKER_01]: They walk supervised grounds that overlook the valley. 3:51 [SPEAKER_01]: But here's where it grows complicated. 3:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Lawson's annual reports, which historians discovered in the Vermont State Archives reveal a darker reality beneath the progressive language. 4:06 [SPEAKER_01]: He describes restraint methods in clinical detail, patients who are difficult or excitable, spend days in isolation rooms, 4:17 [SPEAKER_01]: others were came a sole restraints. 4:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Canvas jackets that secure the arms behind the back for hours at a time. 4:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The reports are public documents, they're printed, distributed to the legislature, and yet there's almost no public response, no letters to editors, no reform movement. 4:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Waterbury, it seems, has already learned, not to see. 4:48 [SPEAKER_01]: the asylum grows. 4:50 [SPEAKER_01]: By 1900, it houses 400 patients. 4:54 [SPEAKER_01]: By 1920, nearly 700. 4:57 [SPEAKER_01]: New wings sprawl across the hilltop. 5:01 [SPEAKER_01]: The institution becomes water breweries largest employer. 5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: books, nurses, maintenance workers, rounds keepers, seamstresses, who make patient clothing in the basement workshops, walk down water breweries Main Street in 1925, every third person you pass works at the asylum, or no someone who does. 5:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The economy runs on it. 5:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The tax base 5:36 [SPEAKER_01]: I found something revealing in the Waterbury Historical Society Archives, school compositions in the 1930s, where children write about what my parents do for work. 5:50 [SPEAKER_01]: The asylum employees children describe their parents as working at the hospital, or up the hill. 5:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Never the asylum, never the insane asylum 6:04 [SPEAKER_01]: the euphemisms start young. 6:08 [SPEAKER_01]: The 1940s brings changes. 6:12 [SPEAKER_01]: The asylum ads medical treatments, insulin shock therapy, hydrotherapy tubs, in a 1947 electroconvulsive therapy. 6:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The patient population peaks at 1100. 6:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Staff numbers reach 500. 6:30 [SPEAKER_01]: And here's what the record show, Waterbury becomes two towns occupying the same geography. 6:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Downtown Waterbury, the restaurants, the movie theater, the community dances, and asylum Waterbury. 6:47 [SPEAKER_01]: The world behind the brick walls. 6:51 [SPEAKER_01]: They don't exactly ignore each other, but they don't quite acknowledge each other either. 6:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Margaret Fitzgerald worked as a nurse at what was now called the Vermont State Hospital from 1952 to 1975. 7:06 [SPEAKER_01]: I found her oral history and the Vermont Folk Life Center archives recorded in 2003. 7:16 [SPEAKER_00]: I lived in water bury my whole life, grew up three blocks from the hospital, and I realized that first week I had no idea what went on up there. 7:28 [SPEAKER_00]: None of us did. 7:29 [SPEAKER_00]: We knew it was there. 7:31 [SPEAKER_00]: We just didn't know. 7:34 [SPEAKER_01]: What she learned, the hospital housed everyone, Vermont didn't know what to do with, 7:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The genuinely mental ill, yes, but also the elderly with dementia. 7:48 [SPEAKER_01]: People with developmental disabilities, epileptics, women who'd had children out of wedlock, men who'd never recovered from shell shock from the first World War. 8:01 [SPEAKER_01]: By the 1950s, evidence indicates perhaps a third of the patients could have lived in the community with minimal support, but for mod had no such support systems, the hospital was it. 8:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Margaret describes the wards, the long rooms with 20 beds, the day rooms where patients set for hours, nothing to do, 8:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The locked wards were the most disturbed patients lived in near total isolation. 8:36 [SPEAKER_01]: She also described something else. 8:39 [SPEAKER_01]: The patients who worked in the hospital laundry, who knew every staff member by name. 8:45 [SPEAKER_01]: The man who maintained the flower beds, with such care that people drove up from town just to see them. 9:00 [SPEAKER_01]: She tells the recorder. 9:02 [SPEAKER_00]: They were just people. 9:04 [SPEAKER_00]: That's what struck me most. 9:07 [SPEAKER_00]: They were just people nobody knew what to do with. 9:11 [SPEAKER_01]: The 1960s and 70s bring the de-institutionalization movement to Vermont. 9:18 [SPEAKER_01]: It's driven by several focuses, shocking exposés of asylum-conditions nationwide. 9:25 [SPEAKER_01]: The development of psychiatric medications that allow outpatient treatment, a growing sense that institutionalization itself causes harm 9:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Vermont begins closing wards, reducing census, and 1975 the patient population drops below 600 for the first time in 50 years. 9:50 [SPEAKER_01]: But evidence suggests what happened. 9:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody really planned where people would go. 9:57 [SPEAKER_01]: The state develops some community programs, 10:07 [SPEAKER_01]: former patients describe living in boarding houses in Waterbury and Mount Pilar, subsisting on disability checks, some thrive with their new freedom, other cycle through homelessness, jail and re-admission. 10:24 [SPEAKER_01]: in Waterbury? 10:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Still, doesn't quite talk about it. 10:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The hospital keeps shrinking. 10:32 [SPEAKER_01]: By 1985, fewer than 300 patients, by 2000, just 54. 10:39 [SPEAKER_01]: The vast brick buildings stand mostly empty. 10:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The state tries to decide what to do with them. 10:49 [SPEAKER_01]: August 28, 2011. 10:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Tropical storm Irene hits Vermont with catastrophic force. 10:57 [SPEAKER_01]: The Wynusky River, which runs through Waterbury, just below the hospital campus, rises, and rises. 11:08 [SPEAKER_01]: By Sunday afternoon, it's clear. 11:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The hospital sits directly in the flood path. 11:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Here's what happens. 11:16 [SPEAKER_01]: According to the Portland Press Haralds, 2016 retrospective, hospital staff began evacuating 51 psychiatric patients. 11:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Some are seriously ill. 11:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Some are on legal holds, committed by courts, unable to leave voluntarily. 11:37 [SPEAKER_01]: All need careful management during 11:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The staff loads patients onto buses and driving rain. 11:46 [SPEAKER_01]: The water is already lapping at the parking lot. 11:49 [SPEAKER_01]: They drive to the Woodstock hospital to run on regional, spreading patients across whatever facilities have room. 11:59 [SPEAKER_01]: By Monday morning, the first floor of the Vermont State Hospital sits under four feet of 12:06 [SPEAKER_01]: The psychiatric hospital for months last state run facility is destroyed, not damaged, destroyed. 12:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Black mold blooms in the walls within days, electrical systems are ruined. 12:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The entire medical record system, paper files dating back decades, sits and contaminated water. 12:31 [SPEAKER_01]: the state makes a decision. 12:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The Vermont State Hospital will not reopen. 12:37 [SPEAKER_01]: 120 years. 12:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Over. 12:44 [SPEAKER_01]: In the months after Irene, Waterbury holds community meetings. 12:49 [SPEAKER_01]: ostensibly about flood recovery, but something else happens. 12:55 [SPEAKER_01]: People start talking about the hospital, really talking about it. 13:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Former employees describe their work, families acknowledge that their parents, grandparents worked there for 40 years, and never spoke about what they saw. 13:13 [SPEAKER_01]: former patients, or their children, begin sharing stories. 13:19 [SPEAKER_01]: The silence, white suddenly, becomes unsustainable. 13:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Dawn Stevens, who worked as a mental health counselor at the hospital, from 1978 to 2005, told VT Digger in 2013. 13:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Irene forced us to reckon with what we'd lost, and in doing that, 13:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The reckoning takes several forms. 13:47 [SPEAKER_01]: First, the practical, where well Vermont's most seriously ill patients receive care, that the state scrambles do create new facilities. 13:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Some patients go to the former retreat and battlebarra, reopened as a psychiatric facility, some to a new unit as central Vermont Medical Center, some to out of state placements 14:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The dispersal reveals something uncomfortable. 14:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Vermont, in 2011, still hadn't developed the robust community mental health system. 14:23 [SPEAKER_01]: It promised back in the 1970s, when the institutionalization began. 14:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The hospital was supposed to be obsolete, but for many patients it remained the only option 14:38 [SPEAKER_01]: 2. 14:39 [SPEAKER_01]: The Historical Waterbury begins examining its asylum past with fresh eyes. 14:46 [SPEAKER_01]: In 2013, the University of Vermont's Eugenics Survey Project publishes new research on the Vermont State Hospital. 14:56 [SPEAKER_01]: What they find is deeply troubling. 14:59 [SPEAKER_01]: From 1925 to 1936, the hospital participated in Vermont's eugenics program, sterilizing patients deemed unfit to reproduce. 15:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Records indicate, at least 253, sterilizations at the hospital during this period. 15:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Though the actual number may be higher, many patients never knew. 15:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Others were coerced, told they'd be released if they consented. 15:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Some were sterilized without any consent at all. 15:37 [SPEAKER_01]: The research makes front page news across Vermont. 15:41 [SPEAKER_01]: For Waterbury, it's a gut punch. 15:44 [SPEAKER_01]: This happened here in their town, in their hospital. 15:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The research also uncovers other stories, patient letters that reveal intelligence, humor, desperate sanity, staff reports that document genuine attempts at treatment and care, art created by patients, paintings, poems, music that shows the full humanity, 16:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The Vermont Historical Society creates an exhibition in 2015. 16:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The asylum on the hill, Waterbury, and the Vermont State Hospital, 1891 to 2011. 16:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Thousands of people came from across Vermont, many were former patients or friendly members. 16:41 [SPEAKER_01]: They'd never had a space to talk about their experiences before. 16:46 [SPEAKER_01]: The exhibition includes photographs of the hospital at its peak, patient artwork, restraint devices, the camosoles, leather straps, displayed without euphemism, oral histories from staff and patients playing on loop. 17:06 [SPEAKER_01]: But what was most powerful? 17:08 [SPEAKER_01]: A memory wall where visitors could leave their own stories. 17:13 [SPEAKER_01]: By the exhibitions and it held over 400 contributions, former patients describing years of institutionalization. 17:23 [SPEAKER_01]: But also the staff member, who smuggled in birthday cake, 17:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Families acknowledging the relief they felt when they're mentally ill, relative with hospitalized, and the guilt that relief brought. 17:36 [SPEAKER_01]: The wall held no easy answers, but it held acknowledgement, finally. 17:46 [SPEAKER_01]: The physical hospital remains, that's the strange thing. 17:50 [SPEAKER_01]: The main asylum building, the 1891 structure, still stands on the hill above Waterbury. 17:58 [SPEAKER_01]: blood damaged, but structurally sound, to expensive to demolish, to contaminated, to occupy. 18:08 [SPEAKER_01]: For years after Irene, it sets empty. 18:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Windows broken, walls, stained with water damage and mold, a massive architectural ghost. 18:21 [SPEAKER_01]: But something interesting happens in the conversation, 18:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Waterbury stopped pretending, the building doesn't carry weight. 18:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Developers acknowledge the history. 18:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Architects talk about ordering the sites past, while creating something new. 18:39 [SPEAKER_01]: The euphanisms fall away. 18:41 [SPEAKER_01]: People call it what it was in a asylum, a place of suffering, and also of care. 18:50 [SPEAKER_01]: A necessary institution, a caused harm, a piece of Vermont's history, complicated and unavoidable. 19:00 [SPEAKER_01]: In 2018, the Waterbury Historical Society launches an oral history project, specifically focused on the hospital. 19:09 [SPEAKER_01]: They interview former patients, staff, family members. 19:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Their building intentionally, the record that should have existed all along, 19:20 [SPEAKER_01]: the interviews are difficult. 19:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Some people describe abuse, staff who were cruel, doctors, who were cavalier with treatments, a system that warehouseed people for convenience, others describe kindness, nurses who set with patience through night terrors, occupational therapists who saw potential others missed. 19:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Both things are documented 19:50 [SPEAKER_01]: what the record shows. 19:53 [SPEAKER_01]: I want to end with something that happened in 2014, three years after Irene. 20:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The Vermont State Hospital buildings sit empty, but they're not abandoned. 20:06 [SPEAKER_01]: They're still state property and they need to be secured. 20:11 [SPEAKER_01]: The problem, the campus is fast, multiple buildings, outbuildings, acres of grounds, people keep breaking in, urban explorers, photographers, people looking for shelter. 20:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The state tries fencing, alarms, nothing quite works. 20:33 [SPEAKER_01]: than someone has an idea. 20:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Search and rescue dogs. 20:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Vermont's canine search teams need realistic training environments. 20:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The abandoned hospital campus offers exactly that. 20:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Complex buildings, multiple floors, real world search scenarios. 20:54 [SPEAKER_01]: The state strikes an agreement. 20:56 [SPEAKER_01]: The K-9 teams can train on the campus and exchange their presence to tourists' trespassers. 21:04 [SPEAKER_01]: The dogs wear GPS callers that mark where they find scent. 21:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Creating a digital map of access points that need better securing. 21:14 [SPEAKER_01]: It's practical, efficient, very Vermont. 21:18 [SPEAKER_01]: But here's what strikes me when I read about it and the water barrier round about. 21:24 [SPEAKER_01]: For the first time in the hospital's history, the campus was helping people. 21:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Not treating them, not warehousing them, helping. 21:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The dogs learned to find lost hikers, missing children. 21:45 [SPEAKER_01]: They train in the same buildings where thousands of Vermonters want to live to involuntarily and they learn skills that will save lives. 21:55 [SPEAKER_01]: There's something both haunting and hopeful in that. 21:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Be a silent and it's after life becomes a place of rescue, rather than confinement. 22:07 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not redemption, exactly. 22:09 [SPEAKER_01]: You can't redeem 120 years of institutional history with search and rescue training. 22:15 [SPEAKER_01]: but it's something a small act of transformation. 22:22 [SPEAKER_01]: That's the story of Waterbury's asylum, how a town learnt to speak about what had taught itself not to see. 22:30 [SPEAKER_01]: If you found this story as complicated and necessary as I did, share it with someone who wants to understand how institutions shape the places we live. 22:41 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Shane Waters, every hometown has a story. 22:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Tonight, it was Waterbury. 22:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Good night, friend.
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