Mystery deepens as K-9 team sniffs out possible former asylum burial grounds
June 12, 2024 | By Cheryl Casey | CorrespondentSearch dog Zevia on the trail near the Ice Center in Waterbury. Photo by Cheryl Casey
Under clearing Saturday morning skies, a keen and focused 6-year-old German shepherd named Zevia zigged, zagged, and circled back through the tangled underbrush of ferns and tree branches behind the Ice Center on River Road in Waterbury.
Specially trained in historical human remains detection, she had a singular purpose on this outing: detect the scent of the old state hospital burying grounds.
The K-9 search was part of the ongoing quest by state Rep. Anne B. Donahue to identify the final resting place of all of the people who died while in the care of the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury between 1892 and 1912. Donahue, a Northfield Republican, has served in the state House since 2003. She began this project in 2013, driven by her own experience with major depression and a conviction that the individuals buried by the hospital, although unclaimed by family or friends during this 11-year period, must not be erased from Vermont’s collective memory.
The cemetery that wasn’t
Donahue’s pursuit already has twists and turns worthy of an Agatha Christie mystery and the plot continues to thicken. Earlier this month, Vermont Public reported on an archaeological dig at the presumed site of a hospital burying ground located beside a present-day mountain bike trail on Perry Hill. The dig’s somewhat surprising conclusion: It found that no cemetery actually existed there.
“That ground has never been disturbed by human hands,” a mystified Donahue said following the exercise.
The first person to be buried in the state hospital cemetery on Perry Hill was Joseph Warren, on January 2, 1892, according to this report in the Vermont Watchman and State Journal newspaper on Jan. 6, 1892.
According to Donahue’s exhaustive research, the hospital did use a section of the land it owned on Perry Hill as a cemetery between 1892 and 1896. The Vermont Watchman and State Journal newspaper in Montpelier mentions a burial in its January 6, 1892, issue. By 1896, the hospital was under investigation by a special legislative committee for alleged cruelty. In late November of that year, several Vermont newspapers including The St. Johnsbury Caledonian, the Vermont Phoenix in Brattleboro, and the Burlington Free Press, reported that the committee had confirmed abusive and cruel practices at the state institution. The Vermont Phoenix devoted a full paragraph to the asylum cemetery location in its reporting about the committee’s findings.
Clipping from the Vermont Phoenix newspaper, Nov. 27, 1896, references 'The Asylum Cemetery.'
These and other contemporary descriptions of the cemetery’s location are vague but seemed enough for state officials to confirm the Perry Hill site examined earlier this month by Donahue and state archaeologist Jess Robinson. In 1991, the Vermont Department of Mental Health held a ceremony and dedicated the site with a stone marker honoring the former state hospital patients.
Now in 2024, Donahue hoped to take the site preservation a step further with the installation of a fence. First, an archaeological dig was planned to definitively confirm the cemetery’s existence and boundaries. That took place last month and found nothing.
State Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, observed part of the dogs’ search on Saturday. A resident of Perry Hill and past president of the Waterbury Historical Society, Wood has been following Donahue’s research with interest. She also worked for the Department of Mental Health at the time of the stone’s dedication and helped plan the 1991 ceremony.
“My jaw dropped,” she said, describing her reaction to the news that the Perry Hill site does not contain graves.
The granite marker placed in 1991 at the Perry Hill site believed to be the Vermont State Hospital cemetery. Photo courtesy of Waterbury Historical Society
Close, but not quite
So what sent officials on the wrong path in 1991?
A key piece of documentation at the time was a description of the location in “Empty Beds,” a 1988 book about the history of the Vermont State Hospital by Marsha Kincheloe and Herbert Hunt.
According to records in the Waterbury Historical Society’s archives, Hunt began researching the hospital’s history while working there as the farm superintendent. In a pamphlet he published in 1965, Hunt described how to reach the location of the cemetery—a description purportedly central to decisions about where to place the stone marker nearly 30 years later.
P. Howard “Skip” Flanders, an avid researcher of Waterbury history and frequent presenter for the historical society, expressed bewilderment at how the cemetery location has been misunderstood and misidentified. If the directions came from Hunt’s manuscript, “I can’t believe they didn’t confirm the location with Herb before the monument’s dedication,” Flanders said. “That’s the mystery to me. If it’s in the wrong spot, what role did Herb play?”
Donahue believes that Hunt, who passed away in 2013, was never consulted to clarify his description. She had the opportunity to interview Hunt not long before he died, but because she was only in the early stages of her research, “I didn’t know the right questions to ask,” Donahue said.
Over a decade later, Donahue is better equipped to make sense of Hunt’s description of the site, and she believes not only that the existence of the cemetery is certain, but that “it is in the general area of that hillside” on Perry Hill, Donahue wrote in an email. In her view, Hunt describes a far more accessible–and logical–spot than the one commemorated in 1991, lower on the hill and close to an old logging road evident on maps from a century ago.
The cemetery that might be
In the course of her research, Donahue gained access to a portion of Hunt’s manuscript that was left out of the oft-referenced “Empty Beds” text. The unpublished 1965 manuscript mentions a second hospital cemetery used after 1896 until 1912, after which time such burials were required by law to take place in town cemeteries.
According to Hunt, a then-90-year-old patient remembered when the original cemetery on Perry Hill reached capacity and “the hospital began burying bodies in the meadow between the Dump Road and the Winooski,” recounted Donahue. She added that “several longtime staff have said there was always a rumor of a second cemetery somewhere…this past year, an elderly woman who had worked [at the hospital] for decades said the rumors were that it was in the area just north of the town dump.”
During the 20th century, the town of Waterbury operated a landfill on the eastern side of the present-day ice center recreation area property. That spot today is in the vicinity of the dog park and a vacant area used by the town public works department. Land where the ice rink, large recreation field and pump park are located now was once Vermont State Hospital property.
A detail in state hospital records also stands out to Donahue as pertinent: between 1892 and 1896, burials were noted as taking place specifically in the “asylum cemetery” on Perry Hill. The last recorded burial there was in December 1896. At this point, the Perry Hill location was considered full with 19 individual burials. Donahue has the detailed records of those burials, however given the results of the archaeological work in May, the location of the graves has now become part of the mystery.
The hospital went on to inter 10 more individuals by 1912, but records refer to the location only as “on hospital grounds” or “hospital burying grounds.”
The existence of a second burying ground meant the stone marker on Perry Hill wasn’t just off-base in its location, but erroneously counted those last 10 individuals’ remains as included on the site.
After triangulating information about property lines and roads from maps printed in the decades just before and after the turn of the 20th century, Donahue formulated a hypothesis about the existence and location of this second hospital cemetery. She believes an overgrown patch of land between the rear of the Ice Center and the Winooski River, adjacent to the present-day soccer field, holds a previously unrecognized piece of asylum history.
To test her hypothesis, Donahue brought in the dogs.
Handler Tonya Guare releases Wyatt into the brush. Photo by Cheryl Casey
On the scent of a mystery
Last Saturday morning, Tonya Guare and Bonnie Ricker, founders of the Vermont-based organization Never Stop Searching 4 U specializing in human remains detection, set their dogs on the site Donahue hypothesizes the old second cemetery might have been. The once-clear section of meadow is in the floodplain and covered by trees and underbrush, so it poses a number of challenges in the quest to determine whether human remains were once laid to rest there.
Trainer Bonnie Ricker waits as search dog George takes in the scene near the Ice Center in Waterbury. Photo by Cheryl Casey
According to a 2021 article in the journal, “Advances in Archaeological Practice,” the discipline of human remains detection by canines has been evolving for over two centuries, with formal training techniques developing in the 1970s. Commonly called cadaver dogs, they were first used to detect historic human remains in 1987, when a trained Labrador located burials from the War of 1812 in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada.
The dogs are not trained to find actual bodies. Rather, they are trained to sniff out long-lingering odors emitted by decomposition. This training is rigorous in order to minimize the frequency of false positives, according to a 2020 article in The New York Times about a controlled study in Croatia where cadaver dogs located four tombs previously unknown to archaeologists on the site of a prehistoric hill fort. Human remains were confirmed to be 2,700 years old.
Tonya Guare downloads data from Zevia's search. Photo by Cheryl Casey
Behind the Ice Center, Guare and Ricker’s dogs were eager to get to work. Guare trains and handles two German Shepherds: Zevia, age 6, and her brother Wyatt, age 2. Ricker’s two dogs are English-bred Red Fox Labradors: an 11-month-old female named Charlie and a 9-year-old male, George. According to Ricker, “it takes about two years to certify a dog,” so Charlie is still working toward her first certification. As the veteran of the pack, George will retire at 11.
Each dog is brought in by its handler one at a time so that they serve as a “check” on each other’s work. A GPS device on the dog’s collar keeps the dog within the determined search perimeter and also records the coordinates of each spot where it signaled a scent. The handler places a flag in a color assigned specifically to that dog on the site.
Zevia was the first one in, and when she and Guare emerged from the woods, Guare reported that the dog “signaled three spots, ultimately in a circle.” Two of these locations were signaled as up in a tree, which is not unusual. “The tree roots will suck the odor and bring it up,” Guare said.
Pack elder George went in next with handler Ricker. Ricker’s data confirmed that George signaled in similar areas as Zevia, mapping a 30-foot radius that both dogs were keen on. Before even sending in the younger dogs, Guare wanted to plan a return trip to probe the site further. By loosening the soil, the probe can “bring up and confirm the odor of human remains,” she explained.
Flags mark spots where dogs detect a scent. Photo by Cheryl Casey
Also along for the expedition on Saturday was Duxbury resident Steve Grace, whose articles in the Duxbury Historical Society newsletter about his memories of the state hospital recently caught Donahue’s attention. He came to watch the dogs search for very personal reasons. His grandfather, Moses Thibault, was a bookkeeper at the state hospital for nearly 40 years, retiring in 1944. His mother, Helene (Thibault) Grace, also worked at the hospital and when old enough, Steve followed suit, starting as a cart boy in the kitchen and eventually working as an attendant.
“This mystery is so interesting,” Grace said, astonished at the prospect of finding a new burial ground close to the Winooski River. “I never heard a rumor about a cemetery here. It’s a real revelation.”
At the end of the day, Donahue summarized the findings, which are preliminary when using this method. “The dogs’ handlers…unquestionably believe the dogs were scenting some human-remains presence in that sector,” she said referring to the area behind the ice rink. “They centered much of their search time returning to the same area, sniffing for more scent.”
The search area is overgrown making it difficult to find any signs of possible grave markings. Photo by Cheryl Casey
A dog with a bone
According to Donahue, there are a number of options for next steps in unraveling this mystery.
One would be to bring the dogs back at another time of year in different weather conditions, because “odors release differently at different times,” she said. The recent tree growth also makes the use of ground penetrating radar more viable, as roots and underbrush are relatively unestablished.
Donahue also believes that critical clues will come from “finding people who knew the area before the interstate.” Such sources could be helpful in locating both cemetery locations, she insisted.
“We would love to hear from anyone who either knows of old rumors about…a second burying ground, and anyone who remembers where the asylum cemetery on Perry Hill may be from seeing it when there was still evidence of graves or markers,” Donahue said.
K-9 handler Bonnie Ricker holds a mesh bag of rib bones used to train her dogs to detect the scent of historic remains. These bones are estimated to be about 200 years old. Photo by Cheryl Casey
She also hopes Guare and Ricker and their dogs “will be able to return to give a preliminary response to a potential revised location for the first asylum cemetery [on Perry Hill] that I have hypothesized by using Herbert Hunt's written instructions,” she said.
One thing that’s not a mystery is Donahue’s commitment to this project. She has captured the curiosity of many, including Gaure and Ricker, who volunteered to conduct the search.
Vermont law covering deaths, burials and autopsies includes the establishment of an Unmarked Burial Sites Special Fund, which can make funding available at the discretion of the Commissioner of Housing and Community Development. Earlier this year, Donahue introduced H.555, a bill titled, “An act relating to enclosing the Vermont State Hospital cemetery.” Citing concern for proper delineating of the cemetery and the potential for damage to the site given its proximity to popular recreation trails, the legislation would have appropriated just over $13,000 for the state Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation to enclose the state hospital cemetery site on Perry Hill with a fence The bill did not move forward to passage by the legislature this session and the project is now on hold until the correct location can be identified.
Those familiar with Donahue’s efforts, however, don’t doubt that she will reach her goal of seeing the former state hospital burial grounds properly designated and documented.
“She’s not going to stop until she finds these people and gives them the dignity they deserve,” Wood said.
Grace agreed, chiming in, “She’s like a dog with a bone.”
Anyone with information that could assist with this project may contact state Rep. Anne Donahue at adonahue@leg.state.vt.us.
Cheryl Casey is president of the Waterbury Historical Society.