Old Wives’ Tale
It was a fitting place for a madwoman, if mad she was. By the 1910s, the tiny town of Hope, in Hamilton County, was as much an economic wilderness as an ecological one. Plagued by both wildfires and deindustrialization, the town struggled for its survival in the early 20th century.
The tanneries were dead and the sawmills were dying. Lumberjacks were more often spotted at sportsmen’s shows than in the woods. The population had plummeted from nearly 800 residents at its apogee in 1850 to fewer than 300 in 1910, losing almost half its population in the first decade of the new century alone. If not for the women of Hope finding piecework in the local glove industry, it is doubtful the town would have survived at all. Against this bleak backdrop unfolded the story of Sarah Bennett, a woman deprived of her liberty in the absence of evidence, advocate, hearing or anything resembling due process for acts tantamount to witchcraft, allegedly perpetrated against her own family on a dirt-poor farm in the foothills of the Adirondack wilderness.
The story—I will not yet invoke “the facts,” for those inconveniences are another matter entirely—runs thus: Sarah and John Bennett lived on a 96-acre farm in the town of Hope at the turn of the century. They had five children: eldest son Fayette, who left the farm as a young man; daughter Maggie, who died as a teenager; and younger boys George, John Ward (known as Ward) and Frank. In 1911, Sarah was accused of what laypeople today call Munchausen by proxy, a form of abuse in which a caregiver convinces a vulnerable charge that he or she is sick, and sometimes makes it so by poison or other nefarious means. There was never any suggestion of physical assault in the Bennett case. Sarah was said rather to have stricken her younger sons by mere persuasion, convincing them to lay abed for over a decade when in fact all three were in rude health.
So far, so plausible, except the Bennett brothers were neither vulnerable nor boys. They had grown, as far as anyone in the neighborhood could recall, into strapping farm lads, and were in their 20s and 30s by the time their malady—or Sarah’s—came to light. The discovery was purportedly prompted by the rerouting of the Northville-Wells highway (today Route
