I always enjoyed injecting a bit of humor about the Town of Pittstown, Rensselaer County, where Nedda and I lived for several years in two different homes that we built. Pittstown is very rural and very small town in its thinking. Our company, Tomhannock, LLC, owned by Nedda, Peter Gibson, and me added hundreds of home sites here and substantially increased the town’s tax base, frequently over the objection of natives who dislike our changing unused land into productive housing opportunities for families.
Once I happened upon the Wikipedia entry for the town and decided to have a bit of fun by adding to its demographic description that the average IQ was 68. I used the name of a local junk dealer who the town government was battling over his violations of town law. That modification prompted the following entry, later deleted, but still available:
Talk: Pittstown, New York
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“The current page lists the average IQ of this town as 68. Assuming this IQ is the "Intelligence quotient" discussed in a Wikipedia article of the same name, this puts the average IQ of this town in the "mildly retarded" range, which is difficult to believe. No reference is cited for this data. I recommend its deletion.
D. Clippinger (a proud resident of Pittstown)”
“D. Clippinger obviously has not carefully researched the unusual 20th-century history of Pittstown. Sparsely populated by many Hessian mercenaries who defected after the Battle of Bennington (actually fought in the adjacent town of Hoosick, in northern Rensselaer County, New York), the town’s industry and sparse population greatly declined with the end of stove manufacturing toward the end of the 19th century, making Pittstown one of the more economically distressed areas in upstate New York.
In an attempt to bolster employment, the New York State Office of Tuberculosis and Pox (later the New York State Department of Health) chose to locate two large tuberculosis sanatoriums there, one in the hamlet of Raymertown in 1873, and later, one in Valley Falls. Although these sanatoriums initially had large patient populations, tuberculosis was substantially controlled by the forerunners of modern antibiotics. Many sanitariums closed, including those in Pittstown. The Valley Falls sanitarium remained vacant until destroyed by fire during the blizzard of 1931, but the larger, Raymertown Sanatorium, located on the Troy - Bennington Turnpike (on the site of what is now the Sterup Square strip mall) was converted into a facility for the mentally ill and hopelessly retarded, named the Morgenstern Hospital.
During October 1936, a series of investigative articles appeared in the Albany Knickerbocker News that revealed that widespread use of an experimental drug made of lithium, mushroom extract, and anisette at the facility had aphrodisiac qualities, and as a result, the patients engaged in promiscuous, unprotected sex. Many female patients became pregnant and gave birth to children at the hospital. Many of the babies born to them looked normal but suffered mental retardation, and in some cases, Brewer's droop. Most were adopted out to people in the community, mainly to farmers who needed large families to help with chores. The infamy resulting from the newspaper disclosure caused the government to order the hospital to be closed and ultimately torn down when the highway was widened in 1952. These adopted children grew to adulthood, married, and for the most part stayed within the Pittstown community, as did their baby boomer offspring and their grandchildren. Also, many of the mentally ill and retarded patients were simply released to the community when the facility closed, and many of them stayed in Pittstown or neighboring Brunswick.
During the mid-1990s the admissions office of Hudson Valley Community College, a county-sponsored college in Troy, noted that an unusually high percentage of applicants from the Hoosick Valley Central School, the Brunswick Central School District, and to a lesser extent, the Hoosick Falls Central School, did not meet the community college’s modest requirements for admission, and notified the New York State Education Department. That agency applied for and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare for a study, which was conducted in the towns of Pittstown, Hoosick, and Brunswick in conjunction with the 2000 U.S. Census. Although the residents of Hoosick and Brunswick tested in the low to the mid normal range of intelligence, the average IQ in Pittstown was found to be 68, using the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Educators concluded that the unusually low average IQ was due both to two centuries of intermarriage, and the many descendants of the persons previously born to
or confined at the Morgenstern Hospital.”
“My understanding is that the Valley Falls sanitarium was destroyed by fire in the Knickerbocker Storm of 1922. I can understand your confusion, as the facilities were the subject of arson in 1931 (alleged to have been set by vandal farmers from the town of Nassau, but never proven).”
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