disorderly conduct. She and her two oldest daughters, Nannie and Jessie, were also held at the City Detention Home. After three weeks there, Mrs. Mallory and her daughters were judged to be feebleminded and were sent to the Colony.
After six months in the institution, Mrs. Mallory was sterilized by Dr. Priddy. He testified at the trial that the surgery was a medical necessity. Mrs. Mallory testified that there was no illness involved and the only purpose of the surgery was sterilization. Shortly after the operation, she was discharged from the institution. Her daughter Jessie was released soon after, also sterilized.
In October of 1917 George Mallory brought suit against Albert Priddy. Mr. Mallory sought damages for the wages his wife lost during the time she was kept at the Colony, as well as compensation for the pain and suffering caused by her sterilization. He also sought the release of his daughter, Nannie, from the Colony.
Dr. Priddy’s testimony that he had admitted Mrs. Mallory to the Colony legally and had sterilized her for medical reasons was apparently convincing enough for the jury. On March 1, 1918, a verdict of not guilty was returned in Mallory v. Priddy. A number of accounts circulated locally, according to Lombardo, indicate that the judge in the case suggested that Dr. Priddy consider not sterilizing any other patients at the Colony until there was such a law which allowed him to legally do so for eugenic purposes.
The effect of this legal scolding was obviously short-lived. In his 1923 report, Priddy was again referring with pride to the sterilizations he had performed for “medical” reasons at the Colony and the positive effect they had on the overall well-being of women on whom he performed the surgery. Also, the embarrassment was soon to give way to a concentrated push on the part of Priddy, Strode and DeJarnette to secure the passage of an eugenic sterilization law which would survive a constitutional test.
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
