Hometown History

In August 1898, a small package arrived at a prominent home in Dover, Delaware, bearing no return address. Inside: a box of chocolate bonbons, a cambric handkerchief, and a note reading "With love to yourself and baby." Mary Elizabeth Penington Dunning shared the candy with her sister Ida Harriet Deane and several guests on the family porch that evening. Within hours, everyone who ate the chocolates was violently ill. Within days, Mary and Ida were dead from arsenic poisoning.
The killer was Cordelia Botkin, a woman sitting three thousand miles away in San Francisco. She had nevermet her victims. Her target had been the family of her former lover, Associated Press correspondent John Preston Dunning, who had ended their three-year affair when he departed for the Spanish-American War. Botkin purchased arsenic from a drugstore on Market Street, laced a box of bonbons from George Haas and Sons Confectionery, and mailed the package from the Ferry Post Office. She had weaponized the United States Postal
Service.
The investigation that followed linked Botkin to the crime through handwriting analysis, drugstore receipts, candy shop identification, and a price tag she forgot to remove from the handkerchief. San Francisco Police Chief Isaiah W. Lees coordinated the cross-continental investigation, and handwriting expert Daniel T. Ames matched Botkin's penmanship to the package and anonymous letters she had previously sent to the family. Her trial in San Francisco captivated the nation, with William Randolph Hearst's Examiner erecting a public bulletin board outside the courthouse to update the crowds.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy