miles away from the farm willed to it.
In February of 1906 the Virginia State Legislature passed an act authorizing the Board of Directors of Western State Hospital and the General Board of State Hospitals to build on the Murkland tract a facility for the care, treatment and employment of three hundred epileptic patients. Through Mr. Murkland’s generosity and compassion, the Virginia State Epileptic Colony was to become an institution of the State of Virginia.
This action, however, did not come easily. The legislature had not yet acted on the matter in 1906 when Senator Aubrey Strode of Amherst explained, in a letter to a physician friend, Dr. George Harris, that the bill was meeting with some resistance. Apparently the economic benefits of the placement of the institution had become a matter of considerable political interest:
Dear Doctor:
We have only a fair chance of getting our Epileptic Colony Bill through. The House Committee on Prisons and Asylums gave the bill a unanimously favorable report and it is now on the calendar in the House. In the Senate committee, however, we have as yet been unable to take up the bill because of the press of other matters, but hope it will reach it next week.
We will need all the help we can get, as such institutions are much sought after and even if we succeed in having it established, some other locality may endeavor to offer inducements to switch it away from the Murkland farm, but we will do the best we can in the matter. It would not be a bad idea if you could get any of your friends in Lynchburg interested in the matter…
The Board of State Hospitals was also slow in moving the matter along. Again Strode intervened. In February of 1907 he wrote about the situation to L. W. Lane, the Commissioner of Hospitals:
Dear Sir:
Please kindly advise me of the latest action taken by the Hospital Board in reference to the Epileptic Colony which it was directed to establish on the Murkland land in Amherst County by the act approved February 20, 1906, and for which $25,000.00 was appropriated, one-half thereof being available before March 1, 1907.
Any information that you can give me in reference to the steps taken by your board up to this time to comply with this act will be appreciated.
Yours respectfully,
A. E. Strode
Throughout the establishment process, Strode, who was later to be the prosecuting attorney in the case of Buck v. Bell, exerted his personal energy and political influence. Contained in his collected papers are copies of letters he constantly wrote to other politicians, hospital superintendents and State Hospital Board members on matters related to the establishment of the institution. He was clearly an important force, indicated by the fact that when the Governor finally appointed the three members of the Board of Directors to manage the affairs of the new Colony for Epileptics, Irving P. Whitehead was one of the prominent members.
Irving P. Whitehead had been a childhood friend of Aubrey Strode. They had grown up on adjoining Amherst farms and remained friends and professional associates throughout their lives. Ironically, but not completely by accident, Irving Whitehead was later to be the attorney appointed to defend Carrie Buck’s interests in her sterilization test case.
The Board of Directors assumed their offices in April of 1910. That same month, they selected Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy to be the first superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics.
Albert Priddy was born of an old and respected Virginia family in 1865. His genealogy traced back to an ancestor who had come to the Colonies in 1650.
Dr. Priddy received his academic preparation in a private school then known as Shotwell Institute. He later studied medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Baltimore. He practiced medicine in Keysville, Virginia, his hometown, until 1901. It was then that he took a position as assistant physician at Southwestern State Hospital. In 1906 he was appointed superintendent of that institution.
Priddy had always taken an active interest in politics, successfully merging his two professions. He represented Charlotte County in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1893 until 1894 and again from 1900 to 1901. During his service in the General Assembly he was a member of the committee on prisons and asylums, and was one of the authors of a law providing pensions for Confederate veterans who had become disabled since the war. In 1900 he was patron in the House of a successful bill which addressed issues relating to the governance of state hospitals and the care of the “insane.” In 1901 he was a member of the joint committee which adopted plans for the improvement and rebuilding of the Virginia Penitentiary.
The choice of Albert Priddy as the Colony’s first superintendent was understandable in light of his past experience as superintendent of Southwestern State Hospital and his political involvement with matters concerning state institutions. He had political connections with Aubrey Strode, since both were Democrats and from the same region of the state. He also had both a political and professional relationship with Dr. J. S. DeJarnette, the superintendent of Western State Hospital. DeJarnette was a power and influence broker within the system of state institutions, and a true believer in eugenics.
Politically and philosophically, Albert Priddy was the perfect choice.
Almost immediately after assuming the superintendency, Priddy cemented his DeJarnette connections by making clear in the institution’s public record that he subscribed to the eugenic philosophy advocated by DeJarnette and others in the state hospital bureaucracy at that time. In his first annual report, written in 1910, he made it very clear that he believed epilepsy to be a genetic problem:
…The epileptic remains with us always, alike the poor, as one of the most pitiful, helpless and troublesome of human beings, with their various and numerous afflictions, and worst to contemplate is the fact that of the known causes which contribute to the development and growth of epilepsy, that of bad heredity is the most potent, and with the unrestricted marriage and intermarriage of the insane, mentally defective and epileptic, its increase is but natural and is thus to be reasonably accounted for.
Dr. Priddy’s second annual report in 1911 included an invocation that he was to repeat over and over for a decade. He issued a challenge to the state’s lawmakers that was to finally reach fruition in 1924.
It is reasonable to anticipate a rapid increase in epileptics and mental defectives. Therefore, it seems not inopportune to call the attention of our lawmakers to the consideration of legalized eugenics.
Thus a public call for compulsory sterilization had been issued.
From the time it was established, the Colony had admitted some people who were mentally retarded as well as epileptic. During its early years, increasing numbers of people who were mentally retarded but not epileptic were admitted. Finally, by 1914, the mission of the Colony had been officially expanded to include people classified as feeble-minded. Soon, Priddy was focusing his eugenic concerns on that group and emphasizing connections between feeblemindedness, crime, alcoholism, prostitution and other social problems. In his 1915 report from the Colony he spoke of feeblemindedness in forewarning terms:
This blight on mankind is increasing at a rapid rate…unless some radical measures are adopted to curb the influences which tend to promote its growth, it will be only a matter of time before the resulting pauperism and criminality will be a burden too heavy…to bear.
Priddy’s statements in his annual reports concerning the “menace” of hereditary feeblemindedness and the socially therapeutic effects of sterilization increased in length and intensity. This escalation seems to have reached its peak in his 1922-23 biennial report. This would be the last report he would write prior to the successful
