Buck v. Bell was Carrie Elizabeth Buck. Some Buildings at the Virginia Colony for Feeble-Minded and Epileptics.Born on July 2, 1906, in Charlottesville, she was raised by foster parents John and Alice Dobbs from the age of three. In 1920, the authorities deemed Buck’s biological mother, Emma Adeline Harlowe Buck, a “low grade moron” and promiscuous for having a child out of wedlock. They committed her to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Madison Heights, near Lynchburg. In 1923, Carrie Buck became pregnant, by her account as the result of rape committed by Clarence Garland, the Dobbs’s nephew. Believing that the pregnancy was evidence of promiscuity and thus of feeblemindedness, John and Alice Dobbs petitioned a court in Charlottesville to have Buck committed, which it did on January 23, 1924. She remained in Charlottesville with another foster family until the birth of her child, Vivian Alice Elaine Buck, on March 28, 1924. Then, with the Dobbs family taking custody of the infant, Carrie Buck joined her mother at the colony on June 4, 1924.