In the 1960s, Tucker State Prison Farm in Arkansas sat on 4,500 acres of Delta bottomland in Jefferson County. Three hundred inmates worked the cotton and soybean fields under the supervision of armed fellow prisoners, a practice the state called the trusty system. Only eight free-world employees ran the entire facility. Behind the walls of the so-called hospital building, a prison physician named A.E. Rollins had rigged a hand-crank telephone to deliver electrical shocks to inmates strapped to an examination table. The prisoners called a short burst "a phone call." A sustained crank was "a long-distance call."

The device became known as the Tucker Telephone, and it operated for years without any outside investigation. Men died of unexplained cardiac arrest. Others carried nerve damage for life. It took an idealist superintendent named Tom Murton, a federal lawsuit called Holt v. Sarver, and a conservative judge willing to use the word "evil" to finally bring the system down, in a ruling that declared an entire state prison system unconstitutional for the first time in American history.

Timeline of Events

1916: Arkansas purchases Tucker Prison Farm, 4,500 acres of Delta bottomland intended for agricultural production using inmate labor.

1960s: The Tucker Telephone is in routine use under prison physician A.E. Rollins. At least nine inmates die of cardiac failure between 1964 and 1967.

January 1968: Governor Winthrop Rockefeller appoints reformer Tom Murton as prison superintendent. Murton discovers unmarked graves at Cummins Prison Farm and unearths skeletal remains showing evidence of violence.

October 1968: Inmates file Holt v. Sarver in federal court.

February 18, 1970: Judge J. Smith Henley rules the entire Arkansas prison system unconstitutional, a first in U.S. legal history.

Historical Significance

Holt v. Sarver transformed American corrections law. Before that ruling, federal courts largely treated prison conditions as a state matter and kept their hands off. Judge Henley's decision established that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment applied not just to individual acts but to entire systems of incarceration. The case set the legal foundation for decades of prison reform litigation across the country. The Tucker Telephone itself became a symbol of what happens when an institution operates without oversight, and it is still referenced in law school textbooks, criminal justice scholarship, and the 1980 film "Brubaker," starring Robert Redford, which drew directly from Tom Murton's experience.

Sources

Holt v. Sarver, 309 F. Supp. 362 (E.D. Ark. 1970), court transcripts Tom Murton, Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal (Grove Press, 1969) Arkansas State Archives photographic collection

If you liked this: Episode 204, Little Rock, Arkansas. Another Arkansas institution that hid what it did to the people in its custody.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 205 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

In 1975, a construction crew breaking ground for a government complex on West Markham Street in Little Rock, Arkansas, unearthed an estimated three thousand to four thousand bodies buried in shallow, unmarked graves. They were patients of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum — committed not only for mental illness but for alcoholism, epilepsy, poverty, old age, and conditions as vague as "emotional difficulty due to menopause." Most had no family to claim them. Most had no headstone. Most had no name left in any record the state still kept.

Shane Waters traces the full arc of this institution, from its hopeful founding in 1883 under the progressive Kirkbride Plan — which demanded sunlight, fresh air, and a maximum of 250 patients — to its collapse into a warehouse for the forgotten, where the patient census swelled past 5,000 in buildings designed for 1,750. Along the way, the asylum survived a devastating tornado in 1894, cycled through name changes meant to mask its failures, and forced patients into unpaid labor on a segregated farm. The story of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum is a story about what happens when a society decides some people are not worth treating — and eventually decides they are not worth remembering.

Timeline of Events

The history of institutional mental health care in Arkansas stretches across more than a century of ambition, neglect, and rediscovery.

1873: Arkansas legislators H.M. McVeigh and D.P. Baldwin introduce Act 66, appropriating $50,000 for a state asylum. Governor Elisha Baxter signs it into law on April 19.

1883: The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum opens on March 1 under Superintendent Dr. Chastaine Caldwell Forbes, with the first patient admitted days earlier by legislative order.

1894: A tornado destroys multiple wards of the South Wing on October 2, killing asylum physician J.T. Ingate and causing over $1 million in damage.

1934-1935: Patient census reaches 4,996 to 5,046 — nearly three patients for every bed in a facility designed for 1,750.

1963: The original Kirkbride asylum buildings are demolished. All traces of the structure vanish.

1975: Construction crews discover an estimated 3,000-4,000 bodies in unmarked graves. Roughly half are relocated to the Benton Services Center cemetery; an estimated 1,500-2,000 remain beneath government buildings and parking lots.

Historical Significance

The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum represents one of the most stark examples of institutional failure in American mental health history. What began as a progressive experiment in architectural healing — rooted in the Moral Management movement of Philippe Pinel and William Tuke — devolved into systematic overcrowding, forced labor, and mass anonymous burial. The 1975 discovery of thousands of unmarked graves beneath state-owned land forced a reckoning with how Arkansas treated its most vulnerable citizens for nearly a century. Today, researchers through the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum WordPress project and the Privett Family Photo Album are working to recover the names and stories of forgotten patients. The site along West Markham Street remains in use as state government offices, with a modest memorial standing over the one-acre plot where an estimated 1,500-2,000 souls still rest beneath the soil.

In the spring of 1903, attorney James Buchanan Marcum faced a terrible daily calculation in Jackson, Kentucky. For seventy-two days, the most prominent lawyer in Breathitt County refused to leave his own home without his infant son pressed against his chest. The reasoning was as simple as it was horrifying: the men who wanted him dead would not risk shooting a man holding a baby. Marcum had made enemies of the most powerful political machine in eastern Kentucky, Judge James Hargis and Sheriff Ed Callahan, by challenging their stolen elections in open court. In a county where at least thirty political murders had already gone unpunished, Marcum was the last reformer standing.

Timeline of Events

The violence in Breathitt County, known as "Bloody Breathitt," stretched across decades of political warfare rooted in post-Civil War factionalism. Key dates in the Hargis-Marcum conflict include:

1901: legal challenge Hargis wins county judge and Callahan wins sheriff in a disputed election; Marcum takes the Fusionist

April 13, 1902: Hargis property Dr. B.D. Cox, an anti-Hargis physician, is killed by more than twenty buckshot wounds near the

July 1902: Town Marshal James Cockrell is shot from a courthouse window; Curtis Jett suspected

May 4, 1903: behind by Curtis Jett J.B. Marcum is assassinated in the Breathitt County Courthouse doorway, two shots from

August 1903: Frankfort Jett and accomplice Tom White convicted; life sentences at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in

February 6, 1908: Department Store Judge Hargis is shot and killed by his own son, Beach Hargis, inside the Hargis Brothers

May 4, 1912: to the day after Marcum's murder Ed Callahan is shot from ambush through the window of his store at Crockettsville, nine years

Historical Significance

The assassination of J.B. Marcum became a turning point for Breathitt County and for Kentucky's approach to political violence. The case drew national press coverage and forced Governor J.C.W. Beckham to deploy state militia troops, the third such deployment in the county's history. The subsequent trials, moved far from Jackson due to the impossibility of seating an impartial local jury, demonstrated both the depth of the region's corruption and the limits of legal reform in Appalachian Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century. The Ballad of J.B. Marcum, recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1937 and preserved at the Library of Congress, transformed a courthouse murder into enduring folk memory. Today, the Breathitt County Museum at 329 Broadway Street in Jackson preserves the county's violent history alongside its Appalachian heritage, and the county that once could not insure a single building is known for its Honey Festival and for filling its entire World War I service quota with volunteers, no man drafted.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 203 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

On April 6, 1936, two tornadoes merged over Gainesville, Georgia, and in just three minutes, killed 203 people, the deadliest tornado in a single building in American history. This is the haunting story of the Cooper Pants Factory disaster and how one catastrophic afternoon changed building codes forever.

Gainesville, nestled in the Blue Ridge foothills, was thriving during the Great Depression. Known as the "Queen City of North Georgia's Mountains, " this manufacturing hub of nine thousand residents had managed to weather the economic crisis better than most American towns. Cotton mills, poultry plants, and garment factories provided steady work for families desperate for income. At the corner of West Broad and Maple Streets stood the Cooper Pants Factory, a brick structure built in 1893 where approximately 125 workers, mostly young women and girls, stitched trousers for meager wages that nonetheless kept families fed.

But the building had a fatal flaw: one staircase. One entrance. One exit. For 125 people.

The morning of Monday, April 6th began like any other. Sewing machines hummed to life. Thread was loaded. Workers settled into their shifts with no knowledge that a meteorological catastrophe was forming in the mountains to the west. Just the day before, an F5 tornado had devastated Tupelo, Mississippi, killing over 216 people, the fourth deadliest tornado in American history. The same storm system that spawned that destruction was now pushing eastward, producing a dozen tornadoes across the Southeast in less than twenty-four hours.

Gainesville had no warning system. No sirens. No weather radar. Two separate storm cells were forming in the hills west of town, moving inexorably toward each other on a collision course with fate.

Among those who would experience the disaster firsthand was C.F. "Stubby" Fiammett, a tobacco salesman attempting to drive to town when the unthinkable happened. As the two tornadoes merged directly over the city, the Cooper Pants Factory, that building with one staircase for 125 people, became a death trap. The structure collapsed in on itself, trapping workers under tons of brick and twisted steel. Fiammett found himself pinned under the wreckage, conscious and listening as the screams of trapped factory workers echoed through the ruins around him. For nearly three hours, he lay there, trapped, as the sounds of human suffering grew fainter. Not because rescue was arriving, but because the women were dying.

This episode explores the meteorological perfect storm, the architectural failures that amplified the tragedy, and the survivors' harrowing accounts of those three minutes of hell. We'll examine how this single disaster forced America to completely rethink building safety codes, fire exits, and structural standards. The Gainesville tornado became a watershed moment in American disaster history, proof that sometimes it takes unimaginable tragedy to force systemic change.

Join us as we walk the streets of this Georgia town and uncover the human stories buried in the rubble of industrial America. This is Hometown History: where local stories changed the world.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 202 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

In the sweltering summer of 1888, a Tampa saloon keeper named R.D. McCormick stepped off a train in Jacksonville, Florida, carrying something far deadlier than luggage. Within weeks, the disease known as Yellow Jack would transform America's booming winter playground into a quarantined city of the dead, sending refugees fleeing north only to be met with armed guards, locked gates, and threats of gunfire. Of the roughly fourteen thousand people who stayed, one in three would contract yellow fever. Four hundred and twenty-seven would never recover.

Jacksonville in 1888 was no ordinary Southern city. A progressive coalition of working-class whites and African Americans had swept the previous year's election, seating five Black council members, a Black municipal judge, and twenty-three Black police officers. The epidemic shattered that experiment in biracial governance. As elected officials fled, civilian leaders stepped forward. Colonel J.J. Daniel organized the Jacksonville Auxiliary Sanitary Association, hiring hundreds of doctors and nurses before the fever claimed his own life. Dr. Alexander Darnes, Jacksonville's first African American physician, stayed to treat patients from both communities. A woman known as Mrs. A.B. Anthony went house to house delivering milk to the sick at her own expense.

Timeline of Key Events

The 1888 Jacksonville yellow fever epidemic unfolded with terrifying speed across five months, from a single diagnosisto a city-wide catastrophe.

July 28, 1888: R.D. McCormick diagnosed as first confirmed yellow fever case

August 10, 1888: Board of Health officially declares epidemic; Jacksonville Auxiliary Sanitary Association formed

September 3, 1888: Acting Mayor J.W. Archibald evacuates the city

Late September 1888: Peak week, 944 new cases and 70 deaths in seven days

November 25, 1888: First hard frost kills mosquitoes and effectively ends the epidemic

December 15, 1888: National and state quarantines officially lifted

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 201 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

Bessemer City, North Carolina. September 14th, 1929. A flatbed truck kicks up Red Carolina dust on a back road outside Bessemer City. The boards rattle beneath 22 pairs of feet. No one in the truck bed carries a weapon. They are textile workers heading home from a roadblock that turned them around. They did what they were told. They turned back, and the cars behind them kept coming. In that truck bed, gripping the wooden side rails, a 29-year-old woman feels the September heat press against her skin.

TIMELINE

WHY THIS MATTERS

Episode 200 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

If you liked this: Episode 168 (Hickory, North Carolina)

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

September, 1912, Forsyth County, Georgia, 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, farming country, red clay roads, pine forests thick enough to block out the afternoon sun. The air sits heavy. It smells like turned earth and wood smoke. More than a thousand black Americans live here. They own land. They go to church. William and Ida Bagley own 60 acres. Grant Smith preaches on Sunday. Children walk to school along dirt paths worn smooth by generations of feet.

TIMELINE

WHY THIS MATTERS

Episode 199 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

January 1886, Carrollton, Mississippi, a Saturday afternoon. Two brothers are hauling jugs of molasses from a wagon into a saloon. Heavy earthenware vessels, maybe 20 pounds each, slick with condensation. Ed and Charlie Brown, part African American, part Native American, working men making a delivery. The doorways narrow, someone's coming out as they're going in. Bodies shift, a jug tilts, and thick brown molasses drips down a white man's sleeve. The brothers stop, apologize.

TIMELINE

WHY THIS MATTERS

Episode 198 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

August 1898, Dover, Delaware. The heat of the day has broken, and the air smells of cut grass and warm earth. On the porch of the Pennington family home, Mary Elizabeth Dunning opens a package from the afternoon mail, a box of chocolate bonbons, a Cambric handkerchief, and a note. With love to yourself and baby, Miss C. She passes the candy around. Her sister Ida takes one. Her daughter takes one. Friends gathered on the porch reach in. The evening is warm. The chocolate is sweet.

TIMELINE

WHY THIS MATTERS

Episode 197 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

In the woods above Brattleboro, Vermont, a 65-foot stone tower has stood since the 1890s. It was not built by architects or hired masons. It was built by the patients of an insane asylum, stone by stone, under the direction of their doctors who believed that breaking rocks could fix broken minds. But some patients found another use for the tower they had built with their own hands. They climbed it one last time. In 1938, officials sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers.

This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history