Settle Building

The Settle Building is a central site in Thomas Birdsey’s long relationship with Three Rivers State Hospital: a place of admission, routine, limited freedoms, and repeated return. For Dominick Birdsey, its entrance becomes a weekly threshold between time spent with his brother and the obligation to leave him in institutional care. The building’s history also sits within a landscape marked by the Wequonnoc Nation, whose burial ground borders the hospital grounds and whose people re-enter the story of the abandoned site.

Setting and Grounds

Three Rivers State Hospital stands at the southern edge of Three Rivers, Connecticut, off the John Mason Parkway. The campus occupies land once used as hunting and fishing grounds by the Wequonnoc Indians. The Sachem River borders the grounds behind, while the town fairgrounds lie to the north and the Wequonnoc burial ground to the south. The Settle Building is identified in the narrative through its entrance and its role in the hospital’s daily routines; the surrounding landscape makes those routines part of a larger history of institutional occupation and Indigenous dispossession.

The cemetery beside the campus is small, with weathered markers and a central pyramid of rocks commemorating Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation. Its stones record Wequonnoc veterans from several wars, including Lonnie Peck, Ralph Drinkwater’s cousin, who was killed in Vietnam in 1969. The cemetery thus holds histories that the institution’s grounds and the town’s official story might otherwise push to the margins. The Settle Building’s proximity to it gives the hospital landscape a double character: a place of confinement and treatment beside a site of communal memory and loss.

Thomas’s Institutional Life

Thomas had been in and out of Three Rivers State Hospital since 1970, and the Settle Building became closely associated with that extended history. Diagnoses, medications, and treating psychiatrists changed over the years. Dominick recalls a period when a high dose of Stelazine left Thomas visibly impaired, and another stretch in the early 1980s when treatment with Haldol coincided with substantial improvement. Thomas moved to a group home and obtained a maintenance job at McDonald’s, a change that briefly carried him beyond the hospital’s daily life. His first paycheck mattered enough for him to have Dominick photocopy it before they cashed it; Thomas kept the copy framed in his room.

At another point, Thomas received a grounds card while taking Thorazine. The card permitted him to walk beyond the building with staff or family, a privilege he regarded with pride. It did not amount to independence, but it altered the shape of a visit: instead of remaining inside the institution, he could accompany Dominick and Dessa along the campus’s older buildings and toward the river and cemetery. These changes in access show how freedom around Settle was measured in permissions and supervised movement, even during periods when Thomas was doing better.

Visits, Routines, and Family

Dominick describes Sunday visits as a ritual governed by hospital schedules. He signed Thomas out of the Settle Building, took him to lunch, visited their stepfather or drove with him, and returned him before supper. The sequence gave the brothers time together, but it also framed their relationship as an appointment with a fixed end: Dominick had to bring Thomas back and sign him in again.

When Thomas had grounds privileges, Dominick and Dessa would meet him at the Settle Building’s entrance and walk with him past the hospital’s original brick buildings and the Ribicoff Research Center, then over the rear boundary toward the Sachem River. Thomas sometimes waded in the current; the three of them often continued to the cemetery. There, Thomas sat smoking and reading his Bible while Dominick and Dessa examined the gravestones. Thomas would eventually join them with interpretations of the Bible and predictions shaped by news reports or dreams. Dessa encouraged Dominick to be patient. He kept his own sense of hurt to himself, and often hurried ahead on the return to the building, where he could complete the visit and leave.

That recurring departure is part of the building’s meaning for Dominick. His visits were acts of care, but they were also obligations he sometimes experienced as a burden. Settle is not merely the place where Thomas lives; it marks the boundary between Dominick’s responsibility for his brother and his wish to escape that responsibility for a while. The building’s routines expose the strain concealed inside the language of family loyalty.

Access, Confinement, and Closure

Thomas’s movement between hospital and community remained conditional. After he earned the privilege of taking a bus into town, he caused a disturbance at Benny’s Hardware, where he believed surveillance devices were everywhere and threw items from the shelves. The store manager called Dominick rather than the police. Dominick persuaded Thomas to quiet down, remove a coat-hanger device he had made, and return with him. The episode shows how a limited grant of mobility could bring Thomas into ordinary public settings without removing the vulnerability that had led to institutional care.

In 1990, after Thomas’s act of self-amputation at the Three Rivers Public Library, he was admitted to Hatch Forensic Institute under a Physician’s Emergency Certificate initiated by a surgeon at Shanley Memorial Hospital. The certificate required a minimum fifteen-day period of observation, and the Psychiatric Security Review Board later voted unanimously to retain him at Hatch for a year, citing potential danger to himself and others. These legal steps concern a different institution, but they clarify the wider system in which Settle had been one part of Thomas’s long history: hospital care, release, review, and renewed confinement were governed by both clinical judgments and formal procedures.

Three Rivers State Hospital began closing its doors in March 1992. Prosperine Albrizio was among the final groups of patients discharged from the Settle Building. Dominick found no surviving records, or evidence that she and Thomas had known each other during their long stays there. The absence of documentation leaves the institution’s daily human connections partly unknowable even as the narrative records particular family visits in detail. After closure, the former hospital grounds became the subject of negotiations between tribal officials and the Governor of Connecticut over a possible return to the Wequonnoc Nation. Settle’s ending therefore belongs not only to the history of psychiatric institutions, but also to the unresolved question of who holds, remembers, and may reclaim the land on which they were built.