This 1925 portrait of two sisters looks sweet until you notice the hair pin.
The photograph seems ordinary at first.
Two young women in matching white dresses, their shoulders touching, their faces turned slightly toward each other in that way studio portraits demanded.
It could be any family portrait from the 1920s, preserved in tissue paper and tucked into an album somewhere between wedding photos and baby pictures until one detail refuses to let go.
Margaret Hollis finds the photograph in April of 2019 in the basement of a Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia.
She is a curator for the state’s historical society, 32 years old, trained in preservation and artifact authentication.
The church is being renovated and the congregation has asked the historical society to sort through boxes of donated materials before anything gets thrown away.
Most of it is junk.
Old himnels with water damage.
Programs from Easter services in the 1970s.
A few ledgers from the church’s founding in 1883.
But there are photographs, too.
Dozens of them, some mounted in frames, others loose in envelopes.
Margaret handles each one carefully, logging them into her tablet.
Studio portraits mostly.
Families posed stiffly.
Children in their Sunday best.
The usual archive of faces that no one alive remembers anymore.
Then she opens a small wooden frame, its backing held in place with bent nails.
The two women inside are young, maybe 19 and 23.
They wear identical white dresses with lace collars.
Their hair is styled in the short waves popular in the mid1 1920s.
The older sister sits slightly forward, her hands folded in her lap.
The younger one leans back just a fraction, her left hand resting on her sister’s shoulder.
Margaret adjusts the lamp on the folding table.
She tilts the frame to catch the light differently.
That is when she sees it.
The younger sister’s hair is pinned back on the right side with what looks at first glance like an ordinary decorative hair pin.
But the light reveals something else.
The pin is metal, thicker than it should be, and stamped with a number.
Margaret pulls out her magnifying loop.
The number is clear now.
6847.
She turns the frame over.
The backing is original.
Brown paper gone brittle with age.
Someone has written in pencil.
Edith and June Carver, 1925.
Sisters reunited.
Reunited.
Margaret sets the photograph down and looks at it again.
The older sister, Edith, stares directly at the camera with an expression that reads as confidence.
Maybe defiance.
The younger one, June, looks away slightly, her eyes fixed on something just beyond the frame’s edge.
And that numbered pin gleams in her hair like a brand.
This is not just a pretty old photo.
Something here is wrong.
Margaret Hollis has worked in archives for 8 years.
She has seen thousands of portraits from the 1920s.
She knows what hair pins looked like then.
She knows the difference between decorative accessories and institutional markers.
She has cataloged images from orphanages where children wore numbered tags on their clothes.
She has seen photographs from tuberculosis sanatoriums where patients wore identification bands.
but a numbered metal tag worn as a hairpin in a formal studio portrait by a young woman in a white dress that does not fit any pattern she recognizes.
She photographs the frame from multiple angles with her phone.
She carefully removes the backing.
The paper tears slightly at one corner, but she manages to preserve most of it.
Behind the photograph itself, tucked between the image and the wooden backing, is a folded piece of paper.
Margaret unfolds it with tweezers.
It is a receipt from Dalton Photography Studio, Lynchberg, Virginia.
Dated June 14th, 1925.
Two portraits paid in full.
And below that, in different handwriting, a note e paid for both.
Jay wore what she came with.
Wore what she came with.
Margaret sits back in the metal folding chair.
Around her, the church basement smells like mildew and old paper.
A dehumidifier hums in the corner.
She looks at the photograph again at that numbered pin at the word reunited written in pencil.
Her phone is in her hand before she fully decides to make the call.
She texts a colleague, Dr.
Raymond Banks, a historian at the University of Virginia who specializes in medical institutions and social welfare programs in the early 20th century.
She sends him a photo of the hairpin detail.
He responds in less than 10 minutes.
Can you meet tomorrow? I think I know what that is.
She feels a weight settle in her chest.
She has learned over the years that when a historian says they know what something is and they want to meet in person to explain, the explanation is never simple.
It is never just an interesting historical footnote.
It is something that someone at some point worked very hard to hide.
Raymond Banks meets Margaret at a coffee shop near the university the next morning.
He brings a file folder, the old-fashioned kind, stuffed with photocopied documents.
He spreads them out on the table between their cups.
Institutional identification tags, he says, used at the Virginia State Colony for epileptics and feeble-minded.
Margaret stares at the documents.
They are intake forms mostly, lists of names, ages, dates of admission.
Each person has a number.
Some of the forms include small photographs clipped to the corner.
In several of these photographs, Margaret can see metal tags pinned to clothing or in a few cases attached to hair.
The colony opened in 1910.
Raymond explains he is in his 50s, soft-spoken with the careful manner of someone used to delivering bad news.
It was one of the flagship institutions of the American eugenics movement.
By 1925, when your photograph was taken, the colony was at its peak.
Over a thousand patients.
He uses the word patience, but something about his tone makes it clear the word does not quite fit.
Most of them were women, he continues, committed by families, by courts, sometimes by employers.
The criteria for being labeled feeble-minded were loose, very loose, promiscuity, poverty, having a child out of wedlock, being difficult to control.
Margaret feels her throat tighten.
And the tags, standard practice, every resident got a number.
It went on their clothing, their bedding, their medical files.
Some women tried to take them off.
Some administrators started pinning them to hair instead or sewing them into hems.
He pauses.
It was harder to remove that way.
Margaret pulls up the photograph on her phone and zooms in on June Carver’s face.
The girl looks so young, 19, maybe 20 at most.
“If this girl escaped,” Margaret says slowly.
Why is she still wearing the tag in the photograph? Raymond leans back and looks at her.
That is an excellent question.
Over the next two weeks, Margaret traces the Carver sisters through every record she can access.
She starts with the obvious, birth certificates, census records, city directories.
Edith Carver, born 1902, appears in the 1920 census living with her parents in Amherst County, Virginia.
June Carver, born 1906, is listed in the same household.
By 1925, Edith is listed in the Lynchberg City Directory as a seamstress living in a boarding house on Fifth Street.
There is no listing for June.
Margaret requests records from the Virginia State Colony.
The process takes days.
The institution closed in the 1990s, but its records were transferred to the Library of Virginia.
Some are restricted, some are incomplete, some were deliberately destroyed.
When the documents finally arrive, Margaret finds June Carver’s intake form.
Admitted March 3rd, 1924, age 17.
Reason for commitment, moral delinquency, and feeble-mindedness committed by Father William Carver with court approval.
Margaret reads the form three times.
The language is clinical, sterile.
There is a brief physical description, height, weight, hair color, a note about a low mental age determined by a Stanford Benet test administered upon arrival.
a check mark next to the word sterilization candidate.
She feels cold.
The next document is a discharge note dated June 10th, 1925.
June Carver released into the custody of her sister, Edith Carver.
Reason for discharge, family request, patient shows improvement.
4 days later, the sisters sat for a portrait at Dalton Photography Studio.
Margaret contacts Dalton Photography, but the studio closed in 1982.
She tracks down the daughter of the last owner, a woman named Patricia Dalton Green, now in her 70s, living in a retirement community outside Richmond.
Patricia agrees to meet.
They sit in a sun room overlooking a garden.
Patricia is sharp, her memory clear.
My father took over the studio from his father in 1950, she says.
But he kept all the old records, ledgers mostly, some negatives.
Do you still have them? Patricia nods.
In storage.
I was going to donate them to the historical society eventually.
She smiles faintly.
I suppose eventually is now.
Margaret drives to the storage unit that afternoon.
Patricia gives her the key and directions.
The unit is packed with boxes, but Patricia has labeled everything.
Margaret finds the ledger marked 1920 to 1929 and carries it out into the sunlight.
She sits on the curb and flips through the pages.
June 14th, 1925.
Carver, Edith, and June.
Two portraits, payment in full, and then at the bottom of the entry, a note in different ink.
Special request, natural hair accessories only, client insisted.
Margaret photographs the page.
She sits there for a long time, the ledger open in her lap, watching cars pass on the highway beyond the storage facility.
Natural hair accessories only, client insisted.
Edith Carver wanted her sister photographed exactly as she was with the numbered tag still in her hair, not as an oversight, not as something to hide or edit out later, but as a record, as proof of where June had been, as evidence.
Margaret begins to understand that this photograph is not a portrait of reunion.
It is a portrait of resistance.
The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded sits on 300 acres outside Lynchber.
In 1925, it was a sprawling complex of brick buildings connected by covered walkways surrounded by farmland worked by the residents themselves.
By 2019, when Margaret visits, most of the buildings are abandoned.
Some have been demolished.
A few have been converted into administrative offices for the state.
She meets Raymond Banks in the parking lot.
He has arranged access through a contact in the state archives.
They are allowed to walk the grounds and photograph the exteriors, but they cannot enter most of the buildings.
Asbestos, Raymond explains, structural damage, liability.
They walk in silence for a while.
The spring air is humid, heavy.
Margaret can hear birds in the trees, the distant sound of traffic on the highway.
It is hard to imagine this place as it was.
Hard to picture a thousand women living here, working here, locked behind doors they could not open.
Raymond stops in front of one of the abandoned buildings.
The windows are broken.
Vines climbed the brick walls.
This was the women’s dormatory.
He says they slept in rows of beds.
40, 50 women to a room.
The tags helped staff keep track during headcounts.
Margaret takes photographs.
She zooms in on the broken windows, the rusted bars, the doorways with their heavy locks still visible.
What happened to the women who were sterilized? She asks.
Raymond is quiet for a moment.
Most of them never knew, he says finally.
The procedure was often disguised as an apppendecttomy or treatment for menstrual problems.
The medical records were vague.
Families were told their daughters had routine surgery.
The women themselves were not told anything at all.
How many in Virginia? Over 8,000 between 1924 and 1979.
Most of them women, most of them young.
The colony accounted for more than a third of those.
Margaret feels sick.
She lowers her camera.
There was a legal case.
Raymond continues, “Buck versus Bell, 1927.
Carrie Buck was a resident here.
The Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s right to sterilize her without consent.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion.
He said, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
” Raymond’s voice is steady but tight with anger.
That ruling stayed on the books until 2001.
It has never been formally overturned.
Margaret looks at the building at the broken windows reflecting the sky.
She thinks about June Carver, 17 years old, locked in one of those rooms wearing a numbered tag in her hair.
She thinks about Edith Carver paying for a portrait, insisting that the tag stay in the photograph.
Edith knew, Margaret says she knew what they did to her sister.
Raymond nods and she wanted proof.
Back in her office, Margaret pulls every document she can find about the Carver family.
She discovers that William Carver, the father, was a textile mill foreman.
He had three daughters.
Edith was the oldest.
June was the youngest.
The middle sister, Ruth, died of tuberculosis in 1923.
In the 1930 census, Edith and June are living together in Lynchberg.
Edith is still listed as a seamstress.
June’s occupation is listed as home duties.
By 1940, June is gone from the records.
Margaret searches death certificates, marriage records, hospital admissions, nothing.
She finds the answer in an unexpected place, a church membership role from the African-American Baptist Church, where she found the original photograph.
The role lists June Carver as a member from 1926 to 1938.
Next to her name, someone has written moved north.
Margaret contacts historians in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore.
She posts inquiries in genealogy forums.
She searches newspaper archives for any mention of June Carver.
3 weeks later, she gets an email from a librarian in Philadelphia.
There is a June Carver listed in the 1950 census, living in the Germantown neighborhood, working as a cleaner in a hospital.
The age matches.
Margaret requests a copy of the full census record.
When it arrives, she sees that June is listed as living alone, unmarried, no children.
She sits at her desk and stares at those two words, no children.
She understands now what the colony took from June Carver.
Not just a year of her life, not just her freedom, but her future, her body, her choice.
And Edith Carver made sure there was a photograph to prove it.
Margaret begins the process of preparing an exhibition.
She pitches the idea to her supervisor at the historical society, a man named Thomas Brennan in his 60s.
Cautious by nature, she shows him the photograph, the research, the documents from the colony.
Thomas listens.
He frowns at the image of the numbered tag.
This is heavy, he says.
It is the truth, Margaret replies.
I know.
He leans back in his chair.
But we will need to be careful.
This is going to upset people.
What people? Donors, board members, families who had relatives at the colony.
He rubs his forehead.
We have descendants of colony administrators on our board, Margaret.
People whose great-grandfathers were doctors there, whose family names are on buildings in Lynchburg.
This is not going to be an easy conversation.
Margaret keeps her voice level.
That is exactly why we need to do this.
The board meeting happens in June in a conference room with wood paneling and portraits of Virginia governors on the walls.
Margaret presents her findings to 14 people seated around a long table.
She has prepared a presentation, 30 slides carefully worded.
She shows the photograph.
She explains the tag.
She walks them through the research.
The room is silent when she finishes.
Then a woman at the far end of the table speaks.
Her name is Elellanar Whitfield.
Her family has donated to the historical society for three generations.
I appreciate the research, Ellaner says carefully.
But I am concerned about the framing.
My great uncle was a physician at the colony.
He was trying to help these women.
The science of the time supported the belief that feeble-mindedness was hereditary.
These were not malicious people.
They were products of their era.
Margaret feels her jaw tighten.
With respect, Mrs.
Whitfield, the women who were sterilized did not consent.
They were not told what was being done to them.
That is not a product of an era.
That is a crime.
Another board member, a man in his 50s, clears his throat.
I think we need to be careful about using inflammatory language.
If we frame this as a criminal enterprise, we risk alienating people who might otherwise support the institution’s history being preserved.
I’m not interested in preserving the institution’s reputation, Margaret says.
Her voice is louder now.
I’m interested in telling the truth about what happened to June Carver and the 8,000 other people who were sterilized in this state.
Thomas Brennan, her supervisor, holds up a hand.
Let us take a step back.
Margaret, no one here is suggesting we ignore this history, but we do need to think about how we present it.
An exhibition about eugenics is going to draw attention, media attention, political attention.
We need to be prepared for that.
Then let us be prepared.
Margaret says the debate continues for an hour.
Some board members support the exhibition.
Others express concerns about funding, about backlash, about the historical society’s mission to preserve rather than judge.
Ellanar Whitfield suggests that the exhibition include a section on the good intentions of early 20th century reformers.
Margaret refuses.
Finally, Thomas Brennan proposes a compromise.
The historical society will mount the exhibition, but it will include multiple perspectives.
It will present the facts, but allow visitors to draw their own conclusions.
Margaret looks around the table.
She sees people who are uncomfortable, defensive, worried about their reputations and their donors.
She sees people who do not want to be confronted with the truth about their own state’s history.
She thinks about June Carver wearing a numbered tag in her hair, sitting for a portrait her sister paid for.
“No,” Margaret says.
We do not present eugenics as a matter of perspective.
We present it as what it was says.
A systematic campaign of force sterilization that targeted poor women, disabled women, black women, immigrant women.
That is not an interpretation.
That is a fact.
Elellanar Whitfield stands.
If that is the stance this organization is taking, I will need to reconsider my family’s support.
Then reconsider it.
Margaret says.
The room goes silent.
Thomas Brennan looks at Margaret.
She can see the conflict in his face.
He is her supervisor.
He is also a man who has built his career on avoiding controversy, on keeping donors happy, on preserving the historical society’s reputation as a neutral institution.
But he nods.
“We will do the exhibition Margaret’s way,” he says quietly.
“And if we lose donors, we will find new ones.
” The exhibition opens in September of 2019.
It is called Numbered Force Sterilization and the Virginia Colony 1924 to 1979.
The centerpiece is the photograph of Edith and June Carver enlarged to 4T tall mounted on the main wall.
Next to it, a label explains what the numbered tag means.
Below that, a timeline of Virginia’s eugenics program.
To the left, a display case with documents, intake forms, sterilization authorizations, discharge papers.
To the right, a section on resistance, including the story of how Edith Carver secured her sister’s release and paid for a photograph to document what the colony had done.
The exhibition includes testimony from survivors, not from June Carver, whose voices lost to history, but from other women who were sterilized at the colony and who decades later spoke to oral historians about what was done to them.
Their words are printed on the walls in large type.
They told me I was having my appendix out.
I was 17.
I didn’t find out until I was 30 and trying to have a baby.
The doctor said I had no uterus.
I said that was impossible.
He showed me the scar.
My mother signed the papers.
She said it was for my own good.
She said I was not smart enough to raise children.
I was smart enough to know I wanted them.
I wore the number for a year.
They said if I took it off I would lose privileges.
I did not even know what privileges meant.
I just knew I had to wear the tag or I would be punished.
The exhibition draws crowds, larger crowds than the historical society has seen in years.
School groups come.
college classes, journalists, activists, descendants of colony residents who have been searching for records, for proof, for acknowledgement, and descendants of the women who were sterilized.
In October, Margaret receives an email from a woman named Patricia Hughes.
Patricia’s grandmother was June Carver.
Patricia explains that her mother was Ruth Carver, Edith’s daughter, whom Edith adopted after Ruth’s biological mother died in 1923.
Patricia grew up hearing stories about her great aunt June, the sister who escaped, the sister who moved north, the sister whose name was mentioned quietly and sadly, always with the sense that something terrible had happened that no one wanted to explain.
Patricia visits the exhibition on a Tuesday afternoon.
Margaret meets her in the gallery.
Patricia is in her 50s, a social worker from Maryland with June Carver’s eyes.
They stand together in front of the photograph.
Patricia stares at her great aunt’s face for a long time.
I never knew, she says finally.
I knew she could not have children.
I knew there was some kind of institution.
But I did not know they sterilized her.
My mother never told me that part.
Your mother might not have known either, Margaret says gently.
Most families were lied to.
The records were hidden.
Patricia nods.
Tears are running down her face.
She looks so young.
She was 17 when they committed her.
19 when Edith got her out.
Why did they send her there? Margaret has been dreading this question.
She has the intake form in the archive.
She knows what it says.
Moral delinquency.
She knows that in 1924 that phrase could mean almost anything.
It could mean June was raped.
It could mean she had a boyfriend her father did not approve of.
It could mean she was rebellious, difficult, unwilling to obey.
The records say moral delinquency, Margaret says carefully.
That was a catch-all term.
It usually meant the family thought the girl was sexually active or at risk of becoming pregnant outside of marriage.
Patricia closes her eyes, so they locked her up and sterilized her to make sure she could not embarrass them.
Yes.
Patricia opens her eyes and looks at the photograph again.
Edith saved her, she says.
My great-g grandandmother Edith fought to get her out.
She paid for this photograph.
She made sure there was proof.
She did.
And then June left.
She went north and never came back.
Margaret nods.
She lived in Philadelphia.
She worked at a hospital.
She never married.
She died in 1972.
Patricia reaches out and touches the glass in front of the photograph, her fingers resting just above June’s face.
I’m glad you found this, she says.
I’m glad people will know what they did to her.
She deserves to be remembered, Margaret says.
She deserves more than that, Patricia replies.
She deserves justice.
The exhibition runs for 6 months.
It is covered by newspapers, by public radio, by a documentary filmmaker who is working on a project about eugenics in America.
Elellanar Whitfield does withdraw her family’s financial support, but other donors step forward.
descendant organizations, disability rights groups, survivors of forced sterilization who want their stories told.
In March of 2020, the Virginia General Assembly passes a resolution formally apologizing for the state’s eugenics program.
It acknowledges the 8,000 people who were sterilized, the lies they were told, the futures they were denied.
It establishes a fund for memorialization and education.
The resolution mentions June Carver by name.
Margaret reads the text on her phone, standing in the same church basement where she first found the photograph.
The church is preparing to reopen after renovations.
The boxes are gone now, sorted and archived.
The space is clean and bright.
She thinks about the numbered tag in June Carver’s hair.
She thinks about how easy it would have been to miss.
How for decades people probably looked at that photograph and saw only two sisters in white dresses reunited smiling for the camera.
How no one thought to ask what that small metal pin might mean.
Patricia Hughes donates a collection of Edith Carver’s letters to the historical society.
Among them is a letter Edith wrote to June in 1938 when June was living in Philadelphia.
Margaret reads it in the archive wearing white gloves, her hands shaking slightly.
Dear June, I’m glad you are settled.
I’m glad you are far from here.
When I think about what they did to you, I cannot breathe.
I cannot sleep.
I paid for that photograph because I wanted proof.
I wanted someone someday to see that number in your hair and ask what it meant.
I wanted them to know that you were not feeble-minded.
You were not defective.
You were my sister.
And they had no right to take anything from you.
I know you do not like to talk about it.
I know you want to forget, but forgetting is what they want.
They want us to be quiet.
They want us to be ashamed.
I’m not ashamed of you.
I never was.
Love, Edith.
Margaret closes the box and sits in the quiet archive room.
She thinks about all the photographs she has cataloged over the years.
All the faces staring out from frames and albums, frozen in moments that seemed ordinary, pleasant, unremarkable.
She thinks about how many of those photographs might hold hidden stories.
How many tiny details might reveal something darker beneath the surface? A hand positioned strangely, a shadow that does not quite match.
A piece of jewelry that is not jewelry at all, but a marker, a tag, a brand.
How many of those images are not portraits of families, but portraits of systems? Not celebrations of life, but evidence of violence.
She thinks about the textbooks she read in school, the museum exhibits she visited as a child, the family albums her own relatives kept.
She thinks about how easy it is to look at an old photograph and see only what you expect to see.
Beauty, tradition, history, how hard it is to see what is actually there.
The Virginia Colony for Epileptics and feeble-minded is not unique.
Institutions like it existed in nearly every state.
Tens of thousands of people were sterilized in America between 197 and 1979.
Most of them without their knowledge or consent.
Most of them were women.
Most of them were poor, disabled, black, indigenous, or immigrant.
Most of them were never told what was done to them.
And there are photographs of many of them sitting in archives, in museum collections, in family albums, wearing numbered tags, sitting in rows of beds, standing in fields they were forced to work, posing for portraits in white dresses, their hair pinned back with metal markers they could not remove.
Margaret Hollis keeps searching.
She has found three more photographs since June Carvers.
Women wearing numbered tags disguised as accessories.
One in a necklace, one sewn into a collar, one pinned to a hat.
Each photograph has a story.
Each one is evidence.
Each one is proof that the people who were locked away, sterilized, erased, were real.
They had names.
They had families.
They had lives that mattered.
And they left clues.
Small things easy to miss if you are not looking.
A numbered pin in a young woman’s hair.
A folded note in a frame.
A word scribbled on the back of a photograph, reunited.
Margaret has learned to look for those details.
Now, to zoom in, to question, to ask what the official story leaves out.
She has learned that every old photograph is a choice.
Someone decided who would stand where, who would be visible, who would be cropped out or left behind.
Someone decided what would be remembered and what would be forgotten.
And sometimes, if you look closely enough, you can see the resistance.
The sister who paid for a portrait and insisted the evidence stay in the frame.
The woman who kept the numbered tag as proof.
The family who wrote reunited on the back acknowledging that something had separated these sisters.
That reunion was not a given but a victory.
Those details are not accidents.
They are acts of defiance.
Small quiet refusals to let the story be erased.
Margaret closes her laptop and looks out the window of her office.
The sun is setting over Lynchberg.
Somewhere in this city, there are more boxes of photographs waiting to be opened, more frames hiding folded notes, more images that look ordinary until you notice the one detail that changes everything.
She will keep looking because the women who were sterilized, the families who were lied to, the people who were labeled feeble-minded and locked away, they deserve more than apologies and resolutions.
They deserve to be seen, to be believed, to have their stories told not as footnotes or tragic anecdotes, but as evidence of a system that was designed to erase them.
And every photograph that reveals that system is a small act of restoration, a way of giving back to people who had no power when the camera clicked the one thing they were denied.
Proof that what happened to them was real, was wrong, and will never be forgotten.
