House Dogs in the Turnips

Rhode Island had a place where it sent the people it wanted to forget. For forty-seven years, Dr. Joseph H. Ladd ran it, and he recorded everything: the harvests and the deaths, year after year.

Then a nine-year-old boy died in a shower room, and the man who wrote everything down wrote nothing.

House Dogs in the Turnips is what he left out. Drawn from official reports, institutional letters, and records no one was meant to read again, it resurrects Ladd's own voice as a posthumous memoir, written in the aftermath of the accusation that ended his career.

"The farm does not lie," he wrote. "The soil gives you back exactly what your labor and the weather and the worms allow."

Dr. Joseph H. Ladd (1876-1974) was born in High Forest, Minnesota. He attended Norwich University and Dartmouth Medical School, then spent seven years under Walter Fernald at the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded. He arrived at Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1908 and served as superintendent of the Ladd School for forty-seven years. He died at ninety-eight.

Jason R. Carpenter is a Rhode Island writer and researcher who has spent over twenty-five years studying the history of the state's institutions. Previous books include Exeter Girls: Letters from a Feeble-Minded School and Vox Humana: The Story of the State Hospital Pipe Organ.