The Pineys and the Asylum

Mohr's recent manuscript, titled The Pineys and the Asylum: Eugenics, Rural Poverty and the Invention of Four Mile Colony, examines the relationship between a poor rural white community (The Pineys) and the asylum built to house them, Four Mile Colony. Most of the book is set before the farm colony opened in 1914, examining the stakeholders and forces that led to its establishment. The book’s early chapters discuss the scientists, governors, psychologists, fieldworkers, and social activists who collaborated, formally and informally, to establish Four Mile Colony, while the latter two chapters examine the institution after its founding. The farm colony was meant to house Piney boys and men – the white rural poor from New Jersey’s Pinelands – to keep them from reproducing, provide them therapy through hard labor, and make use of previously uncultivated land. One defining feature of the institution’s establishment and early years was that it was a social invention in at least three ways. One, the ethnographic research done on the Pineys and related groups by Elizabeth Kite and Henry Goddard was frequently fabricated. Two, Four Mile Colony never housed a majority of Pineys – whose “feebleminded” nature was the impetus for the establishment of the farm colony – but the institution became home to a significant percentage of African Americans and urban New Jersey residents. Three, abuse of all sorts – physical, sexual, and medical (in the form of unauthorized clinical trials) – came to define the intellectual disability institution that is today known as the New Lisbon Developmental Center, while its institutional motto remained “happiness and home”. 

Adam Mohr is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, and he teaches, writes, and researches in the fields of medical anthropology and medical history. His academic appointment is primarily through the Critical Writing Program at Penn, where he teaches freshman writing seminars in Global Health. He is also a lecturer in the History and Sociology of Science Department, where he teaches a capstone called Race and Medicine in America. Prior to this manuscript, he has published two monographs: Enchanted Calvinism (University of Rochester Press, 2013) and The West African Revival (Baylor University Press, 2023). Both books were transatlantic works focused on the intersection of religion and healing in West Africa and the Americas.