Tales From Fairfield Hills: Evolving Times

By Nancy K. Crevier

(This is the third in a series of Tales of Fairfield Hills, stories shared by local residents who worked and lived there when the property was a functioning psychiatric institution. Now owned by the Town of Newtown and being re-created, the property’s past has been the subject of stories, some of which may be tainted with truth, some which may be purely fabrication. These tales, though, come from the hearts of those who knew it best.)

In 1964, Mary Buxton decided her family could use some extra income help and joined her husband, Buck, as an aide at Fairfield State Hospital (later known as Fairfield Hills Hospital).

“It worked out well for us. We both worked separate shifts and training was provided,” said Ms Buxton.

She remembers her first impressions of the geriatric unit, where she was scheduled. “The patients just sat at the tables, talking. I thought, ‘How nice!’ — until I realized they weren’t talking to each other at all, but to themselves!”

It was terribly crowded in the units at that time, Ms Buxton recalled, and she remembers nurses taking patients out into the stairwells to smoke.

“When my training was over, I was at a special unit in Litchfield House, for patients from Southbury Training School with a double diagnosis,” she said. “It was so crazy then. I wasn’t a nurse, but I could give medications. The doctors were around there, but not so much as in later years,” Ms Buxton said.

Medications were not so widely available for psychiatric patients when she started, so shock therapy and hydrotherapy were used as a means of helping to calm patients. “The water wasn’t cold or hot, it was a nice temperature, and it did seem to soothe some of them,” she said.

A particularly gruesome memory she has is of suicidal patients allowed grounds privileges. “They would walk down to the train track and jump onto the tracks to die, or lie down on the tracks. It was so common,” Ms Buxton recalled, “that one engineer asked to be taken off the route.”

After the farm at Fairfield Hills shut down, which had given many patients a place to work, treatment was mainly through medication.

Many soldiers returned from the Vietnam War as drug addicts, and ended up at Fairfield Hills. Sometime in the early 1970s, the state decided that there should be a program for drug abusers at Fairfield Hills, “and that is what happened to Litchfield House,” said Ms Buxton. “It was a tightly constructed program run by Dr Sutcutliff (sic). I admire him to this day. He really had treatment going on,” said Ms Buxton. Both she and her husband worked in the drug abuse program, she said.

“I worked on the detox floor, upstairs. I supervised the patients who were detoxifying,” remembered Ms Buxton. The program was highly successful, she said, in part because family and group therapy was mandatory. She remembered that during group therapy with the Vietnam veterans, anytime there was a loud crash, those patients would hit the floor.

“Then we were ordered to set up a program for adolescents admitted to the hospital for treatment,” she said, to separate them from the general adult population.

Workers were not encouraged to get to know the patients, a practice that Ms Buxton found frustrating. “I wanted to see things change, so I decided to go for my degree,” she said.

In 1978 she received her MS in agency counseling from the University of Bridgeport, and assisted in planning the program for the adolescents. “There were two teams working with a number of clients. We had family and group therapy, physical activity, and medication was no longer handed out willy-nilly,” said Ms Buxton. “It really was a good program, and things evolved for the better. There was more doctor/patient interaction in my units, and by the 1980s, the number of patients had been reduced to a manageable level,” she said. “The people who worked there were very good,” she said.

“I remember many from the adolescent program. Many were successfully rehabilitated, and became business people. For one, the circle came around and he is becoming a drug counselor now,” said Ms Buxton.

She had fully intended to work at Fairfield Hills until she was 65, Ms Buxton said, but when the adolescent program was shifted to the hospital in Middletown in 1993, she retired early. “Middletown is a long drive from here, and I had never driven a car,” she explained.

She continued to pursue her education, though, and in 1995, the year Fairfield Hills Hospital closed, she received a degree in clinical psychology and her master’s from the New School in New York City.

She recalled the closing of the state hospital as “tragic, not just for the job losses. People were released who just should not have been. Many died in the streets, some remain homeless, even today. There were some group homes, but not all did well in them.”

Fairfield Hills Hospital, Ms Buxton said, was an unforgettable experience. “Seeing the evolution [of care] and seeing the treatment improve was remarkable.”

Living In Stamford Hall

Carol Lockwood was also working in the geriatric unit in the mid-1960s. Her first encounter with Fairfield State Hospital was in 1959, when, as a student nurse, she served her clinical there for an eight-week period. As a student, she lived in Stamford Hall on the campus, and ate in Stratford Hall, the nurses’ and doctors’ dining hall.

“Back then, the medications didn’t have names even, only numbers. Maybe they were trials, but we didn’t know. We just met with groups of patients and kept notes. We weren’t working with very disturbed patients, so I was never afraid. We [the student nurses] always worked together, and security was very good,” she said.

What was alarming to the young woman, was the shock treatment therapy. “It was a rude awakening for me. Some of them went twice a week. But we weren’t there long enough to see the results,” she said.

The tunnels, which have become nearly folklore since the closing of the hospital, were gloomy, said Ms Lockwood, but they were a secure way to move patients from building to building. “As a student,” she said, “we had to take patients through them to Plymouth Hall. That’s where there was a movie theater, a bowling alley, a chapel, and there was a gymnasium. Sometimes the patients would get to fighting with each other there, but then there was someone to help. Laundry, food, and patients all traveled through the tunnels, though less so as the years went by. We even had to transport patients who had died through the tunnels to the morgue. It wasn’t frightening.” She remembered the morgue as being downstairs in a little building, “under the lab, near Canaan House.”

In 1966, Ms Lockwood, an RN, began what would be a nearly 30-year career caring for patients in the state hospital, sometimes as a full-time employee, sometimes as a part-time employee. By then, shock treatment was losing popularity, and new medications were on the scene.

“The doctors saw the patients every day, but it was the nurses and aides who had the bulk of the day to day interaction,” Ms Lockwood said. “[The patients] became almost like family. You were with them day in and day out. The doctors were there when you needed them. I think the patients got very good care,” she said.

The staff often went out of the way for the patients, Ms Lockwood said. “We would put the women’s hair up in rollers on the days we did shampoo. Sometimes, just one little thing, to make them happy, to get them through the day,” she said. Many staff members provided clothing for patients transferred to nursing homes, “So that they didn’t have to go in state clothes,” she said. Until Ms Lockwood gently told one patient she could only talk to her at work, that patient would call her on the telephone regularly at home. “She just wanted someone to talk to,” Ms Lockwood said.

Patients With Babies

She recalled a bit of hospital history that is not common knowledge. “There were even patients with babies when I came, in the 1960s. The babies were born there, but stayed with the mothers for only about five days, and then went to foster homes,” Ms Lockwood recalled. “We fed the babies, changed them, and cared for them. We would bring in our own baby clothes to dress them, when they were sent out to foster homes. They had nothing, otherwise,” she said.

In 1982, Ms Lockwood began working in the drug unit. She is very proud of the care and success of the drug program.

“When one of our patients went to court, the judge said our drug unit was the West Point of drug units at that time. That was nice to hear,” she said.

The Newtown community was very supportive of the state hospital, said Ms Lockwood.

“Church and school groups came in. One couple ran a ‘store’ of donated clothing for the patients, for years,” she said. The Fairfield Hills staff also supported the community, she added, by frequenting the restaurants and stores.

As time went on, Ms Lockwood also observed that more group therapy was provided to patients. “It did change, for the better, over the years,” said Ms Lockwood.

One change she regretted seeing put into place, was the closing of the farm. “I was sorry they did away with it. For some patients, they would look forward to [working on the farm]. It was sad. There was fresh milk from the cows they had there, and the gardens kept some of the patients going, kept them from just sitting around,” said Ms Lockwood.

It is a bittersweet experience, now, when she goes to the Fairfield Hills property. “When I go,” said Ms Lockwood, “I feel like, it was so beautiful. Why don’t they do something with it?”