In the dark of a late May night in 1876, a ten-year-old girl lay awake in the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts. The ward was long and crowded with sick women, lit only by night lamps. Annie Sullivan’s eyesight was failing. Her little brother Jimmy slept in the bed beside her, as he had every night since February.
At the far end of the ward stood a partition. Beyond it lay the room the staff called the dead house. Sometime during the night, Jimmy’s bed was moved through that partition. Annie did not sleep through it.
When she woke, the lamps were still burning, and the space where his bed had stood was black and empty. Her body shook too violently to rise at first. She knew what lay beyond that barrier, and she knew what the emptiness meant. She crossed the room in the dark and went in.
She could not see the bed, so she reached out until she found the iron rail and held it until her legs could support her. She touched the side of the bed, then his small body beneath the covering, cold. Her scream woke the whole hospital. Someone rushed to pull her away, but she wrapped her arms around her brother and clung to him with all her strength.
That was the Tewksbury Almshouse, twenty-five miles from Boston, a charitable institution that had become a state-run warehouse for the poor. The record of admissions tells the story of what happened to the two children before that night. The entry is dated February 22, 1876. The clerk assigned them numbers before anything else: 48457 and 48458.
Annie Sullivan, age ten. James, age five, born in Agawam. Under condition, Annie was listed as having poor eyesight. James was listed with a hip disease.
Under what property the family owned, the clerk wrote nothing. The father, Thomas Sullivan, was an Irish-born laborer with no possessions, working as a farmhand for a man named Stephen O’Hearn. The mother, Alice, had been dead for about two years. A sister, Mary, age three, lived with an aunt.
Neither of the two children had ever attended school. The clerk even got Jimmy’s age wrong; his birth date suggested he was seven, not five. No family member was capable of correcting the paperwork. The almshouse had taken children like the Sullivans since it opened, but it had been overwhelmed from the start.
In 1852, a special legislative committee recommended three new state almshouses to address poverty driven by immigration. The legislature appropriated $100,000. Tewksbury opened on May 1, 1854, built to hold about 500 people. By the end of its first week, it held 668.
By the end of the month, 800. By the end of December, the state had admitted 2,139 people, 847 of them born in Ireland. In that first year, 161 died, most of tuberculosis and cholera. The wooden buildings were poorly designed and prone to fire.
In 1866, the state added a hospital building, and that same year Tewksbury began accepting a category the law called pauper lunatics, the first institution in Massachusetts to do so. By 1879, 40 percent of the beds were for the mentally ill, 33 percent for almshouse inmates, and 27 percent for hospital patients. The building Annie entered in February 1876 was three institutions stacked on top of one another: an almshouse, a hospital, and an insane asylum. The three institutions were run largely by one family.
The superintendent was Captain Thomas J. Marsh, who had held the position for nearly twenty-five years. His wife worked there, as did his son, Thomas J. Marsh Jr.
, whose wife ran the sewing department. Dr. Nellie Marsh treated the women and children. The State Board of Charities counted six members of the Marsh family on the payroll.
The board had already begun taking notes. In 1873, inspectors recorded poor sanitary conditions and bad ventilation in the foundling unit where orphaned children were kept. In 1874, they learned that women with mental illness were being isolated as punishment. In May and June of 1875, high death rates were recorded among those very women.
The board reported to the legislature that responsibility was so dispersed among six relatives that no one was accountable for anything. In 1876, the board’s chairman, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, went to Governor Alexander Rice with a recommendation: the entire Marsh family should be removed. It did not happen. The Marsh family stayed.
Four years later, Sanborn would pass through that building again, and a nearly blind teenager would throw herself at his feet in a corridor. Before that, Annie had to survive four and a half years at Tewksbury. Later, as an adult, she wrote that most of what she remembered was obscene, cruel, gloomy, and dreadful. But she added the part people usually left out: none of it shocked her at the time.
Such things happened. People behaved that way. It was the only life she knew. Her eyesight was deteriorating from trachoma, a bacterial infection she had contracted around age five and never received treatment for.
At the Tewksbury hospital, doctors performed two operations on her eyes, both failures. When Jimmy died, the only comfort Annie found was a severely disabled, deeply religious woman named Maggie Carroll, who told her it was God’s will and she must submit to a life inside the institution. Annie refused. She stopped going to confession, keeping her Irish Catholic roots while abandoning the church.
In February 1877, the state sent her to Lowell, to a hospital run by the Sisters of Charity, for another eye operation. It failed. She stayed there until July, helping the nuns in the wards. Then she went to a city dispensary for another operation.
It failed too. After nearly six months away, she was returned to Tewksbury, and the records show she came back screaming and resisting. She had lived outside, and now she understood what the almshouse truly was. This time, she was not placed with the sick and insane.
She was placed with unwed mothers and pregnant women, which meant Annie Sullivan spent the remainder of her stay next to the part of Tewksbury the state was most worried about. The institution kept its own count of infant deaths for three years in the early 1870s: 44 infants died in 1870, 30 in 1871, and 66 in 1872, 140 dead infants in thirty-six months. The state inspectors described the unit where they died as poorly ventilated and unsanitary. The infants were cared for by poor women, which was cheaper than hiring nurses.
In October 1879, the board of trustees stopped accepting orphaned children altogether. In March 1880, the legislature passed a law requiring that foundlings be sent to private homes. The unit was closed because it could not stop killing children. Annie was still inside.
She was thirteen, living with young mothers, and she heard two things that mattered to her. First, there was a school for the blind somewhere in Massachusetts. Second, the state would be coming to inspect Tewksbury again. In 1880, a delegation of state charity officials walked through the corridors.
Sanborn was among them. Annie did not know who he was. She rushed at the group and threw herself before them, screaming the only sentence she had prepared: Mister Sanborn, Mister Sanborn, I want to go to school. It worked.
Within months, the state that had committed her to Tewksbury released her. She left on October 7, 1880, for the Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston. The women in the ward had prepared her, taking her ragged, ill-fitting clothes and dressing her in better ones. She thought her calico dress beautiful.
On the train, a woman looked at her with pity, and Annie understood exactly what the dress meant. She later wrote that she was glad the woman could not see the only other dress she owned. She also wrote that the essence of poverty is shame. She was fourteen.
She had been a ward of the state, intermittently, since she was ten. Perkins was quiet, polite, Protestant, and prosperous. Tewksbury had been loud and chaotic, full of Irish laborers who spoke openly in public. The other girls mocked Annie because she could not spell the simplest words.
A year after her arrival, she had the first of two operations at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. The second came in 1882. After nearly ten years of near-blindness, she got her sight back, though her vision remained weak for the rest of her life. She found her passion for Shakespeare in a class that met one hour a week and called that hour paradise.
She said her years at Tewksbury had opened horizons for her, revealing dark depths of the human soul that would have remained closed to a happier child. In June 1886, she graduated at the top of her class. The institution she left was about to become the most famous building in Massachusetts. Benjamin Franklin Butler was a lawyer from Lowell, a Union general, and the kind of politician who chose his enemies carefully.
He ran for governor and lost Tewksbury in 1878. He ran again in 1882 as a Democrat, campaigned on Tewksbury, and won. In his inaugural address in January 1883, he accused the almshouse of extravagance and mismanagement, claiming about 70 percent of the state appropriation went to salaries. He vetoed the appropriation bill and then made an accusation that put the story on front pages across the country: he said between 150 and 250 infant bodies were being sold from Tewksbury to medical institutions every year.
The legislature’s Committee on Public Charities opened hearings at the State House in late March. A stenographer was sworn in to record everything. The room was uncomfortably crowded, with about ten women sitting among the legislators. A lawyer named E.
P. Brown stood for the trustees, directors, and superintendent, demanding the charges be put in writing. Butler refused, saying he was not a prosecutor but was there to present evidence and ask questions. The first witness was a Boston physician named Dr.
John Dixwell, who testified about what he had seen during his three years as a medical student in the 1870s. He said hundreds of infant bodies were brought to the school annually for dissection, arriving in boxes on a horse-drawn wagon and stored in a small room until the students were ready. Students obtained them by applying to a man named Bill Andrews, who set the price at three to five dollars per body, infant or adult partial. Andrews was a professional boxer who later committed suicide.
Dixwell said he personally took two or three bodies a week during the season, and some showed signs of having starved to death. Andrews told him the source: the Tewksbury Almshouse. Dixwell said he had given similar testimony to a grand jury in Suffolk County about five years earlier. After argument between Butler and Brown, the committee voted to suspend this line of inquiry.
The second witness worked inside the building. John A. Chase of Lynnfield had worked at the almshouse from 1860 to 1881, and his son still worked there. Chase said he and his son had transported infant bodies to the Grove Street medical school in Boston.
His son received ten dollars per body from Harvard and twelve from a women’s medical college. For infant bodies, Chase received nothing. Then he described something he had seen in the coffins: wooden blocks placed where the infant bodies had been. Religious services were held over those coffins by relatives who did not know, and the relatives then took the coffins for burial.
A dentist from Woburn testified about the price of an adult body. Dr. Sherman H. Sanborn, a different person from the state inspector, was a student at the dental college in February 1878.
He said a bearded man arrived with a covered wagon and a body to sell, asking fourteen dollars. The students pooled their money and bought it. The man said it was from Tewksbury, the body of an adult woman. The third witness, Charles H.
Dudley, testified at night. He had been a night watchman at the almshouse since November 1876, less than six months after Jimmy Sullivan died in that same building, on the same shift. Dudley testified that when he started, Captain Marsh told him the same thing twice: aside from the building burning down, you won’t see much. Marsh also told him, according to Dudley, that things were arranged so that everyone just looked after themselves.
Dudley said he was offered pay if he joined in the work done there at night. He said he saw boxes filled with bedding, blankets, and carpets taken to the railroad station after dark. Mrs. Marsh’s daughter’s family lived in Exeter, New Hampshire, and they visited the almshouse frequently, always taking boxes of these things.
He said he saw Thomas J. Marsh Jr. moving bodies at night in a fast wagon to the station in a stealthy manner. The station was the one the railroad maintained for the almshouse.
Dudley also testified about the children. He said there were about twenty children in one ward crying at night. When he asked why, they said they were hungry. He raised it with Captain Marsh, who replied that he thought they had enough.
Dudley said he had several times dared to bring pieces of bread, and Marsh told him to stop. Then he described a bottle. A night nurse showed him a morphine mixture left by the day nurse and explained its purpose: it was given to the children to quiet them. She said she did not care if it killed them, because it was not her business.
Dudley said something else about that first year of his work. Of all the children born in or brought to the almshouse that year, all but one died. He knew the number because his wife had to count them. It was 73.
A night attendant named Dudley also testified, saying she once entered the dead room and found the body of a woman and a child together in a box. She often found foundling hospital children neglected, saw a morphine bottle used to quiet infants, and reported it to Captain Marsh, who took charge of it ten days later. She described an infant given to the care of a mentally disturbed inmate who smothered it with a pillow, and said Marsh asked her to keep quiet about it. Frank Parker and his wife managed the mental disease ward from 1876 to 1879, the period Annie Sullivan was in the building.
They testified that patients were left for days without food and received no medical care when sick. Some patients’ heads were pierced by insects, and the insects crawled on the beds. About seventy patients were bathed without changing the water, and many had festering sores. They said they called Dr.
Lathrop and the Marsh family’s attention to these matters at the time, and their response was, in their words, cruel indifference. Jennie E. Pope was at Tewksbury from May 1876 to August 1877, sewing dresses for Mrs. Marsh, including one she made for Dr.
Nellie Marsh. She testified that she saw Mrs. Marsh carrying piles of things from the baggage room, some of which looked like silk dresses, and saw one of her granddaughters wearing a dress that resembled one. She saw poor people making carpets from dresses and never saw those carpets used anywhere in the building.
She saw large packing boxes in the hallway that her husband said were addressed to Exeter, and the boxes would disappear from time to time. She also testified about the thing that made every inspection useless: the almshouse was notified of an official visit at least a week in advance, and everything was prepared before the inspectors arrived. Captain Marsh liked to tell visitors he had been given half an hour. On Wednesday and Thursday, a witness appeared who refused to reveal her real name.
She was living in New York and said it might harm her reputation among her friends there. The newspapers called her Mary Eva Bowen. She said her father sent her to Tewksbury in 1875 after the birth of her illegitimate son. She corroborated earlier witnesses about dirty beds and cupboards, insect-infested wards, and the bathing of patients.
Then she said she believed Dr. Marsh had killed her child with morphine, and that she never knew Dr. Nellie Marsh to give her child anything but morphine, cod liver oil, and whiskey. Mrs.
Joanna King came from Salem. Her husband lost a leg working on the Eastern Railroad, went to Tewksbury, and died there. A letter announcing his death arrived at her home on Thursday afternoon. She went that afternoon carrying a coffin.
At the almshouse, they told her he had died on Tuesday and was already buried. She carried the empty coffin back to Salem, where the hearse and carriages were waiting at the station. The trip cost her twenty dollars. Mrs.
Catherine Powers worked at the almshouse, and her infant was with her. She testified that her child’s eyes became infected from the washing, because the same basins and the same towel were used for children who already had the disease. She was not allowed to wash her child herself. The child’s eyes had never hurt before, and they had hurt ever since.
Trachoma spreads exactly that way: shared water, shared towels, no isolation. Annie Sullivan arrived at Tewksbury with weak sight and left nearly blind. Butler then went after the account books, and it turned out the bookkeeper was another Marsh. Charles B.
Marsh testified about how he kept the accounts and admitted his records were irregular in timing. He explained the important part: the money of deceased or escaped inmates was turned over to the state, and he kept the treasurer’s receipt. Then he spoke the sentence Butler wanted. No one but himself knew whether he had returned enough, too much, or too little.
No account for the property of deceased inmates had ever been opened. The committee compared purchases in 1862 with purchases in 1882. In 1862, the almshouse held 912 people. In 1882, it held 892, about twenty fewer.
The number of employees rose from 22 to 53. The amount of food purchased nearly doubled. Beef rose from one pound per person per week to 88,528 pounds total. Fish rose from 21,982 pounds to 33,117.
Butter rose from 3,127 pounds to 18,400. Coal rose from 477 tons to 2,192 tons, at an additional cost of about $22,000 alone. Butler claimed a large part of these supplies never reached the inmates, but was diverted to an inn in Exeter, New Hampshire, run by Captain Marsh’s granddaughter. Then came the evidence that made the story national news.
The Lowell Weekly Sun published a summary of the week’s testimony on April 24, 1883. The headline had two parts: accounts of horrible mistreatment of inmates, and the tanning of a man’s hide. A piece of human skin reached the hearing room in the hand of a city council member. Governor Butler showed Thomas Hill of Woburn a small piece of tanned human skin, and Hill recognized it.
He said a tanner named Bancroft had given it to him out of curiosity, and it was tanned at Bancroft’s tannery. The record describes it as the skin of a Black man. The tanner who did the work testified. John F.
McGivern of Woburn worked for Eustis, Cummings, and Bancroft. He testified that on one occasion, the skin of a Black man was brought to him untanned. Butler asked if he had tanned it, and he said yes. Butler asked if he could identify that specific piece, and when it was handed to him, he said yes.
McGivern said he knew it by the place where the skin was rubbed. He described what he had received: part of the back, chest, and left arm, down to the nails. The man who brought the skin left a card with a name on it: W. F.
Morrison. Morrison told McGivern the skin came from Harvard University and from Tewksbury. McGivern said he had never tanned human skin before or since. Everyone in that chain is named in the newspaper report: the councilman, the tanner, the company, the man who left the card.
The only person no one named was the man the skin was taken from. On July 15, 1883, Butler presented his closing argument to the investigating committee, and he brought evidence. One piece was a slipper. Butler told the committee it was made from the chest of a woman.
Another was tattooed skin. Butler said it belonged to a man named C. J. Eckland, who died at the almshouse in August 1879.
He presented six samples of tanned human skin before the committee and connected them to Harvard and Tewksbury. When the argument was published in pamphlet form, four of his eight illustrations were images of tanned skin. In the argument itself, he told the committee what witnesses inside the medical school had described: ten bodies on the tables, and in the dead room twelve to twenty more bodies stacked like cordwood, haphazardly, with infant bodies between the legs of adults. That sentence made the story nationally famous, and it also made it easy to refute.
The governor was quoting other men about a room he had never entered. Brown had presented his own argument two days earlier. His position on the skin was strict and hard to refute on the evidence. The samples were not directly connected to the almshouse.
If human tissue had been tanned, students had taken it from Harvard’s laboratories without the knowledge of the staff or faculty. Harvard’s own catalog did not improve the university’s reputation. The Warren Anatomical Museum was located in the same anatomy department as the dissecting room, and it published a section on skin and its appendages. The catalog lists the skin of an adult male, dissected from the navel to the knees.
It also lists the skin of a child’s face, injected and dissected as a mask. That was an accredited teaching collection, published in a public catalog in 1870. It was legal. And it was exactly what the governor needed to say the word flaying in public and have a legal basis for it.
Harvard’s response to the infant accusation came in May, from the men who ran the room. Charles Burnham Porter, the assistant instructor of anatomy during Dixwell’s student years, said the medical school received no infant bodies in those years and brought none to the dissecting room. He knew of no arrangements for supplying infant bodies for private dissection. Dr.
William Lambert Richardson, professor of obstetrics, said there were no infants in the dissecting room except specimens in the museum. Dr. Richard Manning Hodges, who prepared specimens for the school, supported both. Dr.
John Foster Bush, a classmate of Dixwell who sometimes dissected with him, said he never saw infant bodies in the dissecting laboratory. Brown spent a long time arguing that Dixwell was unreliable and unstable. Butler spent a long time presenting witnesses to defend his reputation. But the number was the real problem.
Dixwell’s claim, taken at face value, meant he personally dissected between fifty and sixty Tewksbury infants a year. The almshouse’s own statistics for infant deaths during his three student years were 44, 30, and 66. For his testimony to be literally true, nearly every unclaimed infant who died at Tewksbury would have had to go to Harvard, and Dixwell would have had to be nearly the only person dissecting them. By the time he testified, the foundling unit had been closed for over three years.
After October 1879, there were no orphaned children at Tewksbury to sell. Butler was describing a trade that had already ended. Then the prosecution produced a witness Butler could not silence, because she had been inside the building three weeks earlier, alone, with the keys. Clara T.
Leonard of Springfield was a member of the State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity. The board sent her to Tewksbury as a one-woman committee. She arrived on Wednesday, May 2, 1883, at 4:30 in the afternoon, and stayed until noon on Friday, May 4. She had visited twice before, in April 1881 and April 1882, both times without notice and without colleagues.
On the first night, she took the keys of one of the matrons. She walked through part of the insane wards alone after the patients had gone to sleep, unaccompanied by any staff. She examined over 100 randomly selected beds, including those in the remote attic dormitories where boys and men slept. Her report contradicted the hearings point by point.
She found scrupulous cleanliness everywhere, even in parts of the building no one had visited. She found the bathing tubs sufficient in number and good condition, with an abundance of water. There was no common bathing pool or tank in the institution, and there had not been for years, making the shared bathwater testimony impossible as described. She found no insects except some stray ones brought in by inmates, cockroaches near the water pipes, and small mice coming in from the fields now and then.
She talked to inmates out of earshot of the supervisors and doctors. She told them beforehand she wanted the truth. An elderly Irish woman said she had been there off and on for twenty years and had never been mistreated, nor seen anyone else mistreated. Another woman, who called herself a victim of alcoholism, said Captain Marsh had been like a father to her.
But Leonard also counted, and the count was the most damning part of her defense. On May 1, there were 898 people in the institution, plus 44 paid employees, three cooks for about 900 inmates. In the long men’s ward, she found 70 sick men, 39 of them bedridden, under the care of two paid male attendants. In the short ward, 47 feeble men with one attendant.
That was 117 sick and feeble men cared for by three men, including bathing, feeding, medicine, dressing wounds, and cleaning. The rest of the services were left to the patients themselves. She stated that those two wards could not be adequately staffed with fewer than six attendants, and any good hospital would need more. In the women’s hospital and maternity ward, she counted 94 women, 14 sick infants, 12 newborn infants, and 14 small children, 134 patients with four day nurses.
The insane hospital had 235 patients, all women, with seven attendants spread over 16 wards on four floors, one attendant for every 33 patients. Because the women’s wards were understaffed, men had to be used for physical handling of insane women. Leonard wrote that she saw the consequences with her own eyes, and that men should never have the personal care of women in that way. She also asked the long-term male inmates what happened to the dead, and recorded their answers.
Men died and were laid on the beds in the open ward because there were no private rooms. Women who showed signs of death were first moved to a private room. Then the body was placed in a coffin and taken to the chapel until burial. She wrote that every body was examined by a physician before being removed from the bed.
She added a line about her sources: the men who told her were not the kind to gloss over things. The numbers explain themselves on the financial side. Tewksbury spent $2. 09 per person per week.
The Massachusetts General Hospital spent $10. 59. The Boston City Hospital spent $8. 74.
Leonard’s conclusion was not that Butler lied about suffering, but that the suffering was the price of the appropriations set by the legislature. She also acknowledged the most important thing in the case: the orphaned children at Tewksbury had suffered in the past because of the care of poor, ignorant, untrustworthy women. Her report was a defense of the ward keepers and an attack on the legislature that funded them. She ended with emotion, not directed at the governor.
She wrote she never expected to feel ashamed of Massachusetts, but she was ashamed now. A rich state demanding year after year that the poor be maintained at lower cost, while almost all of Tewksbury’s inmates were foreign-born or children of immigrants, most of Irish descent. The committee rejected most of Butler’s charges for lack of evidence, and no action was taken against Harvard. Sanborn, by then a state charity inspector, issued the legal ruling: by delivering bodies to Harvard, the almshouse had been complying with the law.
He was right, and it is the detail most accounts of this scandal omit. In 1831, Massachusetts passed a law to protect graves and legalize the study of anatomy in certain cases, the first anatomy law in the United States. It allowed boards of health and overseers of the poor to deliver the bodies of persons who would have been buried at state expense, so medical colleges could legally dissect them. The law said may, not must.
The delivery of the dead was optional, and the institutional director made the decision. The superintendent of the Massachusetts almshouse had legal cover to send the unclaimed dead to Boston. He was not obligated to do it, and he had a hidden financial incentive to agree. That was the mechanism the hearings exposed, and the committee found it worked as designed.
Providing bodies to medical colleges was consistent with the law. Butler was never really arguing about bodies alone, and he made that clear in his closing argument. He described anatomical education as what is called the interests of science. He told the committee the skins of wild animals were now being tanned to make the soles of aristocrats’ shoes.
Then he aimed at the men who had not served in the army. They stayed home flaying wild animals while the foreigners they mocked fought the country’s battles. That was the real fight: a general from Lowell, elected by working-class and Irish voters, against the institutions of Boston. The hostility had names.
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar had blocked Butler’s political ambitions twice in the 1870s, and Butler had beaten him in a congressional election in 1876. Hoar was president of the Harvard Board of Overseers during the Tewksbury hearings. His brother George was a U. S.
senator. Butler later claimed in his memoirs that Harvard broke its tradition of giving honorary degrees to Massachusetts governors to punish him for the attack. Newspapers divided along party lines. Some published the sensational testimony; others denounced the governor as a liar using false claims for political gain.
Still, the Marsh family lost everything. By June 1883, Captain Thomas J. Marsh was removed after twenty-five years. His wife lost her job, as did Dr.
Nellie Marsh. Thomas J. Marsh Jr. lost his position.
Dr. Lathrop was allowed to resign as medical director. A physician named C. Irving Fisher took over as superintendent.
The changes that followed are why the hearing mattered, regardless of what the committee concluded. Patient food was organized according to medical orders instead of the kitchen. Able-bodied inmates were required to do their own work. In April 1883, the State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity formally became the supervising authority over the almshouse trustees.
A new dead house with a cold storage room was built in 1884 so bodies could be kept on site long enough for pickup. A special committee recommended two additional changes: bodies should be delivered directly to the agents of requesting medical colleges, and the remains should later be returned to Tewksbury for burial. In 1885, the board approved new rules governing how the almshouse dealt with anatomists. The trustees wrote that the requirements of science and the rights of the dead were now protected.
One piece of evidence showed the new rules worked. In April 1884, state police prosecuted a medical student named William Greeley for misuse of a human head. The board suspended the Boston College of Physicians and Surgeons, prohibiting it from receiving the dead entirely, on the grounds that the act might excite public opinion. Butler did not see much of the aftermath.
He lost the 1884 election, and the state returned to Republican George Dexter Robinson. Years later, Butler wrote in his memoirs that the investigation had a great positive effect, because it drew the attention of the whole country to the conditions of institutions. Similar investigations were held elsewhere the following year, and Butler considered them great reforms. Fisher surveyed the cemetery and placed on every grave an iron marker bearing a number and a note indicating whether the buried person was a child or an adult.
Every grave was recorded in the institution’s logs. That was a genuinely new procedure in 1884: numbering the bodies of the poor in the Tewksbury records. Harvard drew a different lesson from the same hearings. Thomas Dwight became a professor of anatomy at Harvard in 1883, the year of the scandal.
In July 1884, Governor Robinson appointed him a trustee of the Tewksbury Almshouse. Dwight spent the rest of his career arguing that the optional delivery law was the problem. He wrote that many officials lived in terror of populists, and that accusing them of desecrating the bodies of the poor was one of the tricks of that trade. In 1898, with Harvard president Charles Eliot, he succeeded in changing the law.
A new statute made the delivery of unclaimed bodies mandatory. Butler had spent a whole year opposing the flow of the poor dead into medical colleges. Fifteen years later, the state made that flow compulsory. The building Annie Sullivan had known did not survive the next century.
By the 1890s, the original wooden almshouse from 1854 was demolished. New brick buildings went up between 1894 and 1905: the administration building in 1894, the chapel in 1896, the main gate in 1900, the men’s hospital in 1901, the women’s hospital in 1903. A home training school for nurses opened on the grounds in 1894 under a nurse named Clara B. Stevens.
After four years, it became a full three-year program. The reason Tewksbury was considered an ideal place to train nurses was the same reason living there was a bitter experience. In 1902, Sanborn told the National Conference of Charities and Correction about the diseases the place received, including every disease that had appeared in Massachusetts except leprosy. He had known it for 38 years.
Its names kept changing. In 1900 it became the Tewksbury State Hospital, then the Tewksbury State Infirmary in 1909, then the Tewksbury State Hospital and Infirmary in 1939, then in 1959, Tewksbury Hospital, its current name. During the first half of the twentieth century, the institution served two functions: the last refuge for the elderly and the mentally ill, and a quarantine hospital for smallpox, typhoid, and tuberculosis. In 1971, the old pre-Civil War infirmary and the last remaining almshouse buildings were demolished to make way for new construction.
What was not demolished is in the woods. There are three cemeteries on the grounds of Tewksbury Hospital, with estimates of at least 10,000 graves. The town website describes a Pine Cemetery trail and provides the records of patients buried there. Those records cover roughly 1890 to 1933 and include more than 8,500 burials.
The cemetery index dates from 1891 and contains 9,342 names. The people buried between 1854 and 1891 are not in it. The grave markers are metal discs about three inches high inside a wreath with a number in the middle, subject to rust. The ground surface has risen around them, and visitors say it is easy to walk past them without seeing them.
Jimmy Sullivan died in May 1876, fifteen years before that index began. His Find a Grave entry notes the problem plainly: burial records are missing for the first twenty years of the institution’s existence, so it is unlikely his grave will ever be precisely located. He is in that ground. No one can say where.
Tewksbury Hospital never closed. That is what distinguishes it from most institutions of this kind. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health runs a 370-bed hospital there today, providing medical and psychiatric care to adults with chronic conditions. Its description notes that the average patient admitted has been rejected by three or more other healthcare facilities, for behavioral problems or high-risk medical history.
The campus covers about 700 acres with 41 buildings, totaling over a million square feet. Alongside the hospital, it offers residential rehabilitation programs, a long-term residence for women with mental illness and substance use disorders, a secure treatment facility for adolescents, and the state’s only facility for a court-ordered driving violator program. The 1894 administration building houses the Massachusetts Public Health Museum. The 1901 men’s infirmary is now named for Annie Sullivan.
The question settled by the 1883 hearings was not whether the poor were badly treated; both sides agreed they were. The dispute was whether that treatment was a crime or just a matter of the budget. Clara Leonard answered that question in May 1883, with numbers: $2. 09 a week.
Annie Sullivan left Tewksbury carrying that budget in her body. She was nearly blind from an infection spread by shared towels, illiterate at fourteen, with a brother buried in an unmarked grave. What she did next is the most famous thing any former inmate of an American almshouse ever did. On March 3, 1887, she arrived at the Keller house in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to teach a deaf and blind six-year-old girl named Helen.
On April 5, at the water pump in the yard, Annie held Helen’s hand under the running water. In the other hand, she spelled the word water. Helen realized that things have names, and then she asked for the names of everything else. Annie stayed with her for 49 years, through Helen’s studies at Radcliffe, through the reading of books, through lecture tours, through the years when Annie’s own sight weakened again.
In October 1936, dying of a heart attack in New York, she dictated her last letters to Polly Thomson. She said goodbye to her husband, John Macy, who had died four years earlier. She talked about Helen and about Polly. She said she had longed for love and had been lonely.
Then she said: Dear Jimmy, I will put these flowers beside your face. Do not take them from me. I loved him so much. He is all I have left.
Annie Sullivan Macy died on October 20, 1936, at age seventy. Her ashes were placed in the Washington National Cathedral, the first woman honored there for her personal achievements. Helen Keller’s ashes were placed beside hers in 1968. In 1876, a ten-year-old girl crossed a barrier in the dark and found her brother’s body under a sheet.
Sixty years later, she was still holding onto him. Jimmy Sullivan was seven years old. The record gave him the number 48458, and then a date.