Rep. Anne Donahue Is Determined to Find Out Where Patients of Vermont’s Old Psychiatric Hospital Are Buried 

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• Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
• Rep. Anne Donahue

Vermont has largely forgotten the patients who died at the former state psychiatric hospital in Waterbury. But Anne Donahue cannot.

The Republican state representative from Northfield, newly retired from her job as an editor for a mental health advocacy group, has made it her goal to identify the final resting place of individuals who died at the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury around the turn of the 20th century.

To this end, Donahue has pored over state archives, hiked the overgrown hills of the former hospital farm in search of a long-neglected burying ground, and helped genealogists in Vermont and elsewhere trace family members who lived at the hospital generations ago.

Donahue has dispatched Statehouse colleagues who live in far-flung towns to search cemetery records for details that could help. In January she introduced legislation calling for the state to inventory unmarked burial grounds at state institutions.

She's pieced together information from patient logs, local histories, turn-of-the-century Burlington Free Press articles and former hospital employees. Her goal is to find out what happened to the bodies of more than 800 patients who died between 1891 and 1913. The latter date reflects when the law changed and towns became responsible for burying their residents who died in state institutions.

"It's a fascinating search — a treasure hunt," she said. "Once I get my teeth into something, I rarely want to let go."

Donahue's search is both personal and professional. A lawyer by training, she was sidelined by major depression from 1994 to 2001. She went on to work as the longtime editor of Counterpoint, the free newspaper of the Vermont Psychiatric Survivors advocacy group.

She's long stood up for people with mental illness. After undergoing electroconvulsive therapy several times in the 1990s, Donahue worked to regulate mental health treatment in Vermont. She also led efforts to pass Vermont's mental health parity law, which requires insurers to provide the same degree of care for substance-abuse and mental health disorders as they do for other maladies. Nowadays, she works to promote community-based mental health support systems as an alternative to institutional facilities.

The ultimate goal of her historical research is to bring patients' names and stories to life on memorials and historical displays. She wants descendants of these patients, as well as visitors to what is now the Perry Hill recreation area, to know that these Vermonters lived and died at the Waterbury institution.

"They are part of a marginalized, forgotten people," Donahue said. "At the time, it was, 'They were psych patients, so we can ditch them somewhere.'"

The Vermont State Hospital was built in the 1890s as the Vermont Hospital for the Insane. It became home not only to people with mental health disorders but also poor people. At its peak, in the 1950s, the hospital housed 1,300 people. Patients farmed and produced furniture and other goods.

In 2012, damage from Tropical Storm Irene prompted the state to move the last of its mental health patients to a new psychiatric hospital in Berlin. The state demolished some buildings and restored others, and the 400-acre property became a state office complex.

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• Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
• A marker at the site of the Vermont State Hospital Cemetery in Waterbury

Donahue had heard in passing that patients were buried in unmarked graves in a cemetery on the former hospital farm. Worried that site would be forgotten, she set out in 2013 to find it. Her first step was a visit to historian Herbert Hunt, who had cowritten a book about the hospital called Empty Beds in the 1960s and was living in a nursing home in Northfield. Hunt told Donahue he had a list of 12 people who were buried at the cemetery from 1891 through 1913. She soon encountered other people with hospital connections who knew of more.

She tracked down notes, spreadsheets and narratives about individual patients — some handwritten — created by hospital staff. And she followed Hunt's instructions to visit the cemetery. They took her through a culvert under Interstate 89, a few hundred feet along a road and 50 feet into the woods up a small knoll.

Unable to find the spot, Donahue wandered at length in the trees. She returned with a measuring tape and eventually located an overgrown section of former field with a large granite marker, installed in 1991, that identifies the final resting place of "twenty or so residents of the hospital."

Donahue concluded that she might never know exactly how many people were buried on the grounds. Busy with other work, she put the matter aside.

Last summer, after retiring, she resumed the pursuit. She spent days in the state archives, which yielded a newly available record with the names of around 1,000 patients who had died at the hospital. She also returned to the cemetery with workers from the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, who helped her spruce up the once-remote knoll, now adjacent to a busy new trail system on Waterbury's Perry Hill. It wasn't clear where in the field the graves were, and bicycle tires had worn a rutted shortcut through the knoll. To her dismay, four cornerstones had been moved to another spot.

Donahue asked the governor's office for $8,000 to pay for fencing. "They said, 'We can find that somewhere,'" she said.

The state archaeologist, Jess Robinson, agreed to help find the graves.

"Anne has done a lot of very good archival research on her own," he said, but added that it's not clear exactly where the bodies are buried on the knoll or how many there are. He is planning to do some digging to confirm that people are actually interred there.

"We're 75 percent certain this is the location," he said. "Before we memorialize it, we'd like to be certain."

After Donahue's legislation was introduced in January, elderly former employees of various institutions sent her information about other burial grounds, including one under the parking lot of the 19th-century Windsor prison, now senior housing that still has jail cells in the basement.

Adam Kersch, lead researcher for Vermont's newly created Truth and Reconciliation Commission, got in touch with Donahue, too. His job is to find the stories of people who have experienced discrimination at the hands of the State of Vermont, and patients of the former state hospital fit that description, he said. Kersch's research shows that people were committed, often against their will, for things such as masturbation, adultery, heavy drinking and menopause.

"The ideas of what was considered insanity are different from the ones we have today," he said. "People would get institutionalized for arbitrary reasons."

Kersch said he has enjoyed following Donahue's search.

"Almost every time I talk with her, she has an update on something new she has found, whether it's finding records that people haven't looked at before or looking at records in a new way," he said. "It's a really dynamic situation, and I feel lucky to get to see how it plays out."

In February the state Division for Historic Preservation vowed to research the Waterbury and Windsor burial sites. Donahue withdrew her bill, because that was its goal.

In her hours spent reading old newspaper clippings, Donahue has stumbled upon many personal stories. From a former Vergennes newspaper called the Enterprise and Vermonter, she learned of a teacher named Fred Sharp who was killed by a falling tree in 1912 while he was a hospital patient working on its farm.

"Sharp taught in a number of towns in the state but showed a tendency toward kleptomania, as well as other signs of being irrational, so he did not stay in a place long," the article said.

Donahue has worked for years with Tom Giffin, the president of the Vermont Old Cemetery Association, who deploys hundreds of volunteers to spruce up neglected cemeteries. In 2022, his group worked on the spot at Lakeview Cemetery in Burlington that held the gravestones of children who lived at the Home for Destitute Children — one of the entities that eventually became Howard Center — in the late 1800s.

Giffin, a lifetime resident of Rutland, has done research similar to Donahue's at many cemeteries, including the ones connected to Rutland's poor farm — a place that housed poor people and sometimes society's other outcasts — and its former prison, known as the House of Correction. Like Donahue, he enjoys glimpsing the characters who peopled Vermont generations ago, including horse thieves, bootleggers and immigrants from China.

"There were African Americans, people with dementia, unwed mothers, poor people who they took for taxes; it's well documented," he said of the poor farm. The association and the City of Rutland have put up kiosks describing who is buried there — critical information, Giffin said, that gives modern-day residents a glimpse of the lives that came before theirs.

"We have a very short memory," Giffin said. "How we took care of our mentally ill at the time was horrible. If you have a marker and there are names on it, it gives a human face to things."

Although Donahue's legislation has stirred others' interest in the Windsor burial site, she's focused on Waterbury, where she's digging deep into hospital records to learn about the lives of individual patients, such as a man who hanged himself from a tree and was buried at the foot of that tree.

Some documents claim bodies are buried elsewhere on the state hospital grounds, and Donahue would like to find out if that's true and, if so, where.

Most of the people who died at the hospital were buried by family members in their hometowns or family plots, Donahue said. She's seeking the people who lacked those connections. Her list is down to 32 recorded patient deaths with no burial details. With whole years of hospital records missing — some of them lost in Tropical Storm Irene — Donahue is keenly aware that she'll probably never really know how many patients died or where they all ended up.

"My goal," she said, "is to come as close as possible to finding out."