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Inside The Colony—Emma, Carrie and Doris

The Murkland property, initially conceived as the site for the future hospital, had not ultimately become the location for the institution. After considering it, the State Hospital Board decided that it was not adequate for the purposes of the Epileptic Colony. The General Assembly authorized the Board to sell the Murkland tract and use the proceeds toward the purchase of suitable land in a more convenient area. The Board bought the Willis Farm, which consisted of 1,000 acres, also on the north bank of the James River opposite Lynchburg.

It was, therefore, to this facility that a frightened seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck arrived on a dreary June 4, 1924.

The day after she was admitted, Dr. J. H. Bell, who would later become Superintendent of the Colony and play a prominent role in Carrie’s future, examined her. He noted that she was dark and slight, with a low, narrow forehead and high cheekbones.

Unlike her mother, who had been admitted in poor health, Carrie’s health was generally good. She was well nourished; her body was clean and free from eruptions. The glandular appearance of her abdomen caused Dr. Bell to report that “she’d had a child.”

Indeed, it was the birth of this child, Vivian Elaine, and the events which had brought about her pregnancy that had caused Carrie to be committed in the first place.

Carrie was to live in Ward FB9, one of several dormitory-like buildings clustered around the Colony. There were as many as 200 beds in each single-sex dormitory. Anywhere from 700 to 1,000 people were accomodated. Since the Colony was a working farm, raising its own pigs, cows and chickens, as well as fruits and vegetables, each inmate was given a work assignment.

Carrie was assigned kitchen duty.

Chores at the institution began at dawn and lasted well into the night. For Carrie, this meant preparing food, serving it, and cleaning up afterward for the two hundred people in her building. The primitive kitchens were grouped in the open areas of each dorm. Carrie and the other kitchen assistants cooked the simple meals in large, black, iron pots.

The meals were served out on tin cups and plates which rattled noisily as they were placed on the rough hewn tables. Almost as soon as one meal was served, eaten and cleaned up, it was time to begin the preparations for the next.

In the few free moments accorded her, Carrie began to find her way around the other buildings. She knew that her mother lived in one of them. Finally, she found her. Her mother had been assigned to the sewing room in Building V. It was the task of Emma and the others assigned there to sew the clothes needed for the inmates of the Colony. Emma was good at her work.

A note on Emma’s chart read: “Patient in good physical health and has not changed mentally. Works well in sewing room and seems perfectly satisfied.”

Mother and daughter were comforted by their meetings, but again it was Carrie’s assuming her familiar caretaker role which made these visits possible, bringing her mother small treats from the kitchen and news of the world outside. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, in their visits together neither mother nor daughter spoke of the past, but only of the trivial, the mundane.

Not long after arriving, Carrie had begun taking furloughs to the Dobbs home. There, she saw for the first time her child, Vivian Elaine.

On December 10, 1927, another member of the Buck family was admitted to the institution, Carrie’s half-sister, Doris. But Doris was not to accept her incarceration as docilely as her mother and sister. Though there were strict rules at the institution “about socializing between sexes,” Doris rarely obeyed them. Several times she slipped away and was gone overnight, until she finally ran off to elope with her first husband.

Doris was also assigned to kitchen duty as Carrie had been—though she took her duties much less seriously and “snuck down to the river as often as possible.” Still, despite the difference in their personalities, the sisters became good friends and saw their mother frequently.

ILLUSTRATION 2: Drewry-Gillian Building where Carrie and Doris Buck lived in open wards on the second floor.

Nevertheless, the work was hard and unending. The Buck girls, like most of those in the Colony, dreamed of getting out and “of being free.”

Her fearful memories of the Colony remained trapped in Carrie’s mind for years after and caused the Newberrys, the family with whom Carrie would be housed when she left the institution, to comment, “She hates the idea of going back to Lynchburg again.”

Carrie herself would beg Dr. Bell, the superintendent after Priddy, to give her a discharge rather than a parole from the place she remembered so painfully:

I hope you will not put it against me and have me come back there…You have promised (the discharge) in a year’s time, but I guess the trouble I had will throw me back in getting it,…but I hope not.

Six months after her arrival, Dr. Priddy stood as a witness before Aubrey Strode (attorney for the Board), R. G. Shelton (Carrie’s guardian) and other members of the Colony Board and gave his opinion of Carrie Buck’s mental condition:

I have had Carrie Buck under observation and care in the Colony since the date of her admission on June 4, 1924, and from psychological examination and the Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon mental test, I have ascertained that she is feebleminded of the lowest grade Moron class. Her mental age is nine years, or of the average child at nine years, and her chronological age is eighteen years her last birthday. The sworn history of her case, as shown in the deposition constituting a part of the commitment papers, is that she is of unknown paternity. Her mother, Emma Buck, is and has been for several years a feeble-minded patient in the Colony of low mental grade. According to the depositions Carrie has had one illegitimate mentally defective child. She is a moral delinquent but physically capable of earning her own living if protected against childbearing by sterilization. Otherwise she would have to remain in an institution for mentally defectives during the period of her child-bearing potentiality covering thirty years. The history of all such cases in which mental defectiveness, insanity and epilepsy develop in the generations of feeble-minded persons is that the baneful effects of heredity will be shown in descendents of all future generations. Should she be corrected against child-bearing by the simple and comparatively harmless operation of salpingectomy, she could leave the institution, enjoy her liberty and life and become self-sustaining.

In a serious voice, R. G. Shelton asked, “Doctor, what assurance can you give that the operation suggested by you in this case will not be dangerous to the health, or even the life, of Carrie Buck?”

LLUSTRATION 3: Albert Sidney Priddy. Reprinted from History of Virginia, Vol. V, Virginia Biography. New York: The American Historical Society. Courtesy of Jones Memorial Library, Lynchburg, Virginia.

Priddy disdainfully turned the question aside, “I have performed and assisted in the performance of 90 or 100 operations on female patients in this institution for pelvic diseases involving the removal of diseased tubes which necessarily required sterilization which is a more radical operation in that the tubes themselves are removed, than salpingectomy performed on sound tubes for sterilization, which is simply a division and ligating the Fallopian tubes without any serious consequences whatsoever.

Patients as a rule leave their beds in from two to three weeks and none of their womanly functions are in the least impaired except that of conception and procreation. The operation for salpingectomy is as harmless as any surgical operation can be, and not a single death has occurred in any of the cases so operated on.”

Shelton weighed this answer: “Might not this girl, Carrie Buck, by some course in proper training in your institution, and without this operation, be brought to such sense of responsibility as that she might be restored to society without constraint and harmful effects both to herself and society?”

Priddy rebuffed this idea. “This would be an impossibility, as mental defectiveness, self-control and moral conception are organically lacking (in her) and cannot be supplied by teaching or training, she being congenitally and incurably defective.”

Shelton persisted, “If this operation be not per formed, do you know of any other way in which this patient might be restored to society?”

“I do not,” Priddy replied confidently.

“Are we to understand,” Shelton said soberly, “that unless this girl is so operated upon it is likely that both for her protection and the protection of society she must be kept in custody and confinement until her childbearing age is past?”

All eyes fastened on Priddy. His answer left no doubt: “It is necessary that she be kept in custody during the period of childbearing.”

With a sigh and a hint of boredom, Aubrey Strode turned to Carrie. “Do you care anything about having this operation performed on you?”

The slight, angular, sharp-featured girl looked at him soberly, pondering the question for several minutes. She seemed surprised that anyone had spoken to her. A silence fell in the room. Then, in the only words she uttered aloud during the entire course of the trial, Carrie said with dignity, “I have not, it is up to my people.”

It would have been perfectly normal for Carrie to have assumed that her family would be involved in making the decision of what was best for her. It was a reasonable assumption of trust for her to make: that somehow, someone would look out for her best interests. Tragically, Carrie had no “people” to help her. She was alone.

The Board’s conclusion came quickly, declaring that:

Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded inmate of this institution and by the laws of heredity is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that the welfare of the said Carrie Buck and of society will be promoted by such sterilization.

Aubrey Strode remembered the atmosphere at the end of the hearing sometime later when he wrote to Don Preston:

The board then inquired if it might safely proceed under the Act, but I had to advise that the Virginia Act had yet to stand the test of the Courts, whereupon I was instructed to take to court a test case.

By the middle of September, not long after the Board had voted that Carrie Buck should be sexually sterilized by Dr. Priddy, the die had been cast in the selection of Carrie for the test case.

Dr. Priddy immediately began accumulating information. On September 19th he wrote to Caroline Wilhelm asking for her help in collecting background information on Carrie. He reminded Miss Wilhelm that she had not only been responsible for Carrie’s admission to the Colony, but her mother’s admission as well. Only a day earlier he had written to Miss Edith Furbish of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, requesting her help in conducting a study of Carrie’s heredity. The major assistance in this particular area, however, was eventually to come from Harry Laughlin, who worked for the Eugenics Record Office in Long Island.

Aubrey Strode, the chief administrator of the State Colony and the legislator who had drafted Virginia’s sterilization law, himself challenged the right of the State to perform the operation. Years later, following Priddy’s death, Strode recalled his original participation introducing the sterilization law:

“Some eighteen years ago, as I recall it, the late Dr. A. S. Priddy, then Superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, who had shortly before that been sued in a Richmond court for a large amount of damages for having sterilized a feeble-minded woman patient in the Colony, and could successfully defend only on the ground that the operation was indicated for therapeutic purposes rather than eugenically, came to me as counsel for the Colony to convey the request of the State Hospital Board that I examine the question and advise the Board upon the prospect of having the Legislature legally enact that inmates of State Institutions for the Epileptic, Feeble-minded and Insane might, after proper proceedings, be sterilized for eugenical purposes.

In the several states in which the legality of similar enactments had been drawn in question in the courts, in every case that I could find, the Acts had been declared unconstitutional on grounds as being class legislation, if confined in operation to patients in state institutions, as not affording due process of law, if the sterilizing was done without proper previous notice and reasonable opportunity to defend against its need, and as depriving a person of the natural right of procreation beyond the power of the state legally to take away.

So, reporting to the Board, I added that several years before that I recalled that when I was a member of the State Senate, Dr. Carrington, Surgeon to the State Penitentiary, had come before the Committee on Public Institutions to suggest the advisability of legislation to allow the sterilization of selected prisoners, but got no favorable response in the light of public sentiment then existent upon the subject.

The Board for the time dropped the matter so far as I know, but, two years later, Dr. Priddy came back to me to say that the Board, in view of its importance to the institutions, and upon the advice of Governor Trinkle who was interested, requested that I draft a bill for presentation to the Legislature curing such defects as I could in the form of the Acts declared invalid by the courts, trusting that the growth of knowledge of the laws of heredity and eugenics and changing public sentiment might bring a more favorable attitude from the Legislature and the courts.

This, after further study, I did. The bill, at the request of Dr. Priddy and of the State Hospital Board, was introduced by Senator M. B. Booker of Halifax and enacted in 1924, I believe without a dissenting vote, so great had been the change of public sentiment upon the subject…I was instructed to take to court a test case. With the very active and helpful cooperation of Doctors A. S. Priddy and J. S. DeJarnette this was done, having as the subject of the litigation Carrie Buck, a typical 19-year-old, feeble-minded patient of the Colony having an illegitimate infant already giving evidence of feeblemindedness, and Carrie’s mother also being a feeble-minded patient at the Colony.

Thus we see the intricate and self-motivated origins of the Virginia law on sterilization. The law itself was born out of a perceived eugenic need, but the actual circumstances of its birth had become extremely personal in nature. Aubrey Strode, lawyer, politician, and war hero, was guided in his advocacy by his close personal friend, Albert Priddy. Priddy, a politician himself, suffering from his recent bouts with the courts regarding sterilization, was extremely anxious to legalize efforts he was already making through sterilizations, camouflaging them under the guise of medical necessity. It would be perfectly natural for him to call in favors he had done for Strode and his second wife, Louisa, who had shared with her husband-to-be her admiration for eugenic researcher Arthur Estabrook. Irving Whitehead, supposedly protecting the rights of Carrie Buck, was indeed a childhood friend of Strode’s, and even secured for him the military position he held during World War I. All of these characters would continue to play their roles in the drama of compulsory human sterilization.

All that was needed was a person through whom the law could be tried.