[forest sounds, birds singing] [birdsong continues, breeze through trees] [footsteps crunching in the brush] - I think of her as kind of like this nature girl, wandering the hills and foraging for herself, taking care of herself.

I think she was really happy when she could be out in that area.

[walking in the brush, birdsong continues] - Let's see if we can track down Minnie.

[microfiche machine whirring] Okay, so this is Minnie's death announcement for, and her burial.

Ms.

Minnie Adams of Brush Valley, who has been a patient in the Dixmont Hospital, died there April 4th.

She was the daughter of the late Lincoln Adams and internment was made in the hospital cemetery last Friday.

[quiet ambient forest sounds] [wind rustling through leaves] [vehicle in the distance, breaks squealing] [truck rumbling, breaks squealing] [footsteps in the brush] [tranquil music] - I am Jennifer White.

My hobby is genealogy.

One day I was working through the paper that was in my local hometown, where I grew up in Pennsylvania and I caught a headline.

It just said something like, you know, "Wild Girl of Brush Valley found Wandering the Hills," and there was no detail, didn't even indicate a name.

I eventually found her name.

Her name was Minnie Adams.

And I just kind of began exploring from that point on wanting to know more about her and filling in the gaps.

When we can look through the records, you can start to piece her story together.

The first place that I looked was the 1900 census.

Minnie Adams was a young girl that lived in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, which is a little east of Pittsburgh.

She was born in 1891.

Her father was named Lincoln Adams and her mother was Lucinda Jane Howard.

They worked a farm.

She's living at that time with her father and then three of her brothers and her paternal grandmother.

There's no indication that she went to school in the past year.

That boxes left blank for her.

So that led me to other questions.

Okay, so what happened between 1891, when she was born, and the 1900 census?

Her mother was listed as having passed away on December 14th, 1897.

It just indicated on that record that she had had a fever that had lasted for 11 weeks.

So there she is, little girl, six years old, and her mother dies.

And then it's from 1910 to 1912, I couldn't, the records were silent until that's when the clippings start to appear in the newspaper.

[sound of pages turning] As I dug through them, headlines just got worse and worse.

"Wild girl, almost destitute of clothing."

Indiana Evening Gazette, Indiana, Pennsylvania.

August 22nd, 1912.

"According to the statement of a number of residents in Brush Valley Township, a young girl, presumably about 21 years of age had been roaming through the woods for several days, destitute of wearing apparel and existing on a meager diet of berries and other raw fruit.

Tuesday afternoon, humane agent J. Wilson Thomas drove to Brush Valley to investigate the case.

He learned that the girl was Minnie Adams, the daughter of Lincoln Adams.

Going to the Adams home, Mr.

Thomas asked to see the girl and was directed into an inner room.

The condition of the unfortunate girl was terrible and fully bore out the testimony of the neighbors.

Dressed in only an old piece of cloth with a rag tied around her head, the girl clung defiantly to the covering of the room, refused to speak and would not look at the officer.

On the advice of the officer, the girl was locked in a room from which all the furniture had been taken and the windows were barricaded.

On her arrival at the institution, she again relapsed into a stubborn condition, refused to speak or look at her inquisitors or otherwise make any effort to assist herself.

The girl's mother died when she was very young and she lived with her father ever since.

She had run wild for a long time and was called the Wild Girl of Brush Valley Township.

It has been learned that while in this condition, the girl had the strength and the agility of a well-trained athlete in that she could tear small trees out by the roots, run with incredible swiftness along the roads and through the fields and hurdle fences, four, five, and six feet high with ease.

Although she never threatened violence, her relatives feared to cross her.

The father claims he is afraid of her.

The authorities are doing what they can for her, but the opinion is that she is demented."

There is a question of how much is sensationalized and how much is true, and we're never gonna know those answers.

[cars driving by] [birdsong] - My name's Jonathan Bogart.

I'm the executive director here at the Historical and Genealogical Society of Indiana County in western Pennsylvania.

We're a small town historical society that preserves Indiana County's history from its founding in 1803 all the way up to the present day.

It's great to see that there's an interest in the past and there's an interest in local history and that, you know, people are still looking to discover more information about their ancestors or just people that they would've known in their community.

[door creaks open] - Okay.

- I'm Sonya Stewart and I am a volunteer and I assist people when they come in to research their family history.

If a family comes in wanting to research, one of the first things we would do is to see if their family name is in our surname folders.

The Adams family would be in this folder.

Each file contains about 50, 50 pages, so we have over 200 pages of obituaries that would be included there.

If there's nothing in the surname files or not in the family histories, we would bring up our library and we would do a search on the subject.

And we have several documents about what happened to Minnie.

We had three different newspapers in Indiana at one point, so these stories would be published countywide.

[microfiche machine squeaking and whirring] - And here's the 28th.

So this should have our article somewhere about Minnie.

This warranted front page news.

So right below the weather, and Mr.

And Mrs.

Cameron going to Florida to visit their daughter.

You have right under that a distressing case and it does talk about Minnie Adams, aged 21 years of Brush Valley Township was brought to the county home Tuesday of last week in a pitiful condition.

So she had little to no clothes on and had cut her hair off.

That's pretty much the extent of, it looks like the beginning of the pry into her life.

Today, you see a lot of items with celebrities and people who are well-to-do, prying into their lives, but you don't really see it with the average person that was abnormal for the time just because of the case.

I think it kind of caught the public's local interest and because of that it was something that they could gossip about, something that was an interest story.

[car passing by] Depending on the town you were in, it was the gossip column.

The papers were pretty much the Twitters, the Facebooks of today.

As soon as you got that spicy detail about someone, it pretty much was out there.

The paper was in a sense the ears of the community.

[book scraping on shelf] [pages crinkling] - Demented girl remains a mute.

The Indiana Progress, August 28th, 1912.

An investigation revealed the fact that the young woman is an extremely ignorant having never attended school and for years has worked in the fields with her father.

Death robbed the home of the wife and mother years ago, and the children have been reared amid the most poverty stricken surroundings since the daughter became deranged weeks ago.

The father has most restraint over her and she lived her wild life in the woods unmolested and was seldom seen by the family until night when she would return to the home for food and shelter.

Almost naked she would roam the woods and at the sight of anyone would hide herself.

While not violently insane, she appears to be in deadly fear of all who approach her.

And all efforts to persuade her to talk have been in vain.

Neighbors who were acquainted with her condition through pity for the unfortunate one, reported the case to authorities.

She refused to eat for several days after she was brought to the county home.

Just this week she's taking nourishment.

She has not spoken and sits in a hunched position in her room.

At the approach of anyone grabs her hair with her hands.

I question whether did Lincoln do those things to her?

Did did he cut off her hair?

Did did he force her to not wear clothing?

Again, I want to blame, I do, I wanna blame someone and for me, the father is the one that's getting the blame.

[truck passes through a quiet forest] Even if he didn't do those things, he should have been doing something.

So I get angry.

[cars passing] The thing that I find really interesting is I know that area and people didn't want to get involved in family business.

And so the fact that neighbors were prompted to to contact authorities to me indicates there was something significant.

And to be able to figure out what had gone wrong.

And of course my mind, you know, fills in those gaps with, you know, a young little girl who lost so much and in a home with only men, you know, that it terrifies me to be honest.

So.

[wispers] Yeah.

- Minnie was only six years old when her mother died.

It is very rare that she would have stayed in that household.

She would've gone to live with her mother's family and that did not happen.

And so my question is, is why did, why did she not go live with Lucinda Jane Howard's family?

Was it because they didn't like him or was it because he refused?

Was it because he needed a farm hand?

Because we see in a later census that she's never gone to school.

She is not listed with any mental deficit in these censuses and census takers are very diligent about doing that.

She is simply too valuable to him to let her go to school or to let her go live a child's life with his own family or with her mother's family.

[birdsong, quiet footsteps in the brush] Minnie had a lot of freedom when she was out in the woods.

She may have felt terrible about her situation, but she might have also felt a freedom that she had not felt before.

She was free from domestic work.

She was free from being bothered by anybody and that might have been the first time in Minnie's life.

She was able to do whatever she wanted to.

[birdsong continues] And Minnie probably was not treated any better at the institution than she had been at home.

[birdsong] [breeze rustling leaves] - She obviously was a very broken young girl and for good reason and family just didn't want the hassle of her.

So that was it.

It was so much easier.

Let's just tuck her away and never look back - In looking at Minnie's history to see what might have caused this psychotic break.

The fact that she took a butcher knife to her hair, I think that's the key right there.

I tend to think that there's a hormonal problem here.

And I don't know that this is true, this is total speculation, but it would certainly not surprise me if in doing a survey of those woods that they found a dead baby buried.

Minnie may have had either a miscarriage or a 10 month abortion as was common back in the day.

And there was such shame attached to it that she might have either killed the child or buried the child and that she might have succumbeded to a postpartum psychosis.

I don't discount the idea that any sort of molestation might have happened within the home, but I do believe that the psychic break from that would've happened much earlier in her life.

I don't discount the idea that somebody local might have molested her.

I also don't discount the idea that Minnie may have been passed around for money and I don't know who would've received that money, whether it was a parent or a brother or herself, but that was not really that uncommon for women of that era.

[calm, melancholy music, birdsong] Minnie was a farm girl.

Being institutionalized would have certainly not done wonders for her mental health state because now she's having to adjust not just to whatever she's feeling inside whatever possible hormones are raging there, but now she's away from everything familiar.

The grass that she strode through on her bare feet, the daisies she picked, the elderberries that she might have picked.

She knows every inch of that land, and now she knows nothing about where she's at.

She doesn't know the people.

Nobody cares about her in any way.

Nobody even knows her name.

[microfiche machine swishing through pages] - So it looks like this is the Lincoln Adams death right here and it lists the sons surviving, but no mention of Minnie.

- Pneumonia caused the death of Lincoln Adams, 55 years of age, at his home in Brush Valley Township.

Lincoln did not live a long life.

Lincoln did not live a happy life.

Lincoln's death really speaks to me of the life that he may have lived.

He was obviously a sad man.

He had lost a wife.

Another one left him.

He was obviously not a pleasant man to live with.

It still makes me wonder what kind of life the boys lived as well, if Lincoln is dying at age 55.

And I'm not sure, you know, George, William and John, why did they not keep the idea of Minnie alive?

That was their only sister.

- I've researched Dixmont, reading about what was like in those institutions at that time and I worry about what sort of abuse may have been going on within the institution, 'cause they were people without voices.

From the early articles when they first took her in, they all said that she was not talking and so I don't know, did she ever regain a voice?

I don't know.

And so what a mark she would've been for any sort of predator.

She had been living at Dixmont for just over four years, and it was 1918 World War I was ending and the hospitals were, you know, exceptionally overcrowded, particularly Dixmont, because of the soldiers coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The accounts from the hospital, if you read about them, was that the beds were in the hallways, just one bed lined up against the next, and that was the conditions in which she died in.

She was, I think 28 and just six years earlier, they had said she was strong, she was athletic, and there she passed.

She so enjoyed being outdoors.

Like they made that very clear in those early articles.

And there she is in an institution not allowed to leave.

I think it would've just destroyed her.

But I hope I'm wrong.

I hope that she found friendship, but somehow I doubt that.

I really do.

- Minnie dies of pulmonary tuberculosis.

When people sleep close together, that is a breeding ground for tuberculosis.

And since she was there for several years, I suspect that is probably what happened to Minnie in terms of her cause of death.

This is always very sad to me.

I've seen the death certificates like this before, sometimes from institutions when families have totally walked away from that person.

The name of her father and her birthplace, the name of her mother and her birthplace is not listed.

Nobody even bothered to tell the institution.

The institution didn't bother to ask.

Nobody cared about Minnie.

She died like she lived, absolutely uncared for.

I need to cry a minute.

I'm sorry.

[quiet forest, birdsong] - It is amazing how attached you get when you start exploring, exploring it.

And honestly, I feel at times like I know her and I don't.

948 was her tombstone number and that was it.

That was, that's all she had.

Her whole family is buried in the same cemetery in Brush Valley and she's not there.

And it, it saddens me.

Cemeteries are really important.

They're the place that we go to remember, they're the place where we celebrate life.

And for her, I just, I just had this vision of her being dumped in that grave and covered up, that nobody, nobody came that morning.

You know, it was a deep loneliness that I felt in that, and it shouldn't have been.

I want people to know her, that her life mattered, that it counted.

If people can remember her, Minnie Adams, not the Wild Girl of Brush Valley Township, if they can remember a story like hers, if they can connect to it and have it in some way translate to how they connect to others today, then I would think that that would be a win.

That she would be honored in that.

[birdsong] [somber orchestral music]