By Kathleen James
Photgraphy By Hubert Schriebl
In East Dorset, the childhood home of AA founder Bill Wilson is a meetinghouse for recovering alcoholics from around the world.
Aldous Huxley called Bill Wilson the greatest social architect of the 20th century. Time magazine named him one of the century’s 100 most important people—a list that includes Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Bill Gates and Albert Einstein. The organization he co-founded in 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous, has reached millions of men and women who struggle with addiction. And today, an estimated two million people worldwide are successfully following Wilson’s example and staying sober one day at a time.
I’m certainly not alone in considering Bill Wilson a hero, a visionary, and maybe even a prophet. So I was surprised to find out, several years back, that I had driven past his birthplace and gravesite a few hundred times. His plain marble headstone, unmarked except for a small stash of mementos left by grateful visitors, sits on a low rise in the East Dorset Cemetery on Route 7A. His birthplace and his home just up the road—one a retreat center, the other a small library—are denoted with only a few small signs. I’ve seen shrines to racehorses, hucksters and half-baked politicians that involve more bricks and mortar, granite and gold than either of these places. But it suits Bill Wilson’s legacy, and honors the life-saving principles he lived by, that these local landmarks are almost—but not quite—anonymous.
Located at the corner of Village Street and Mad Tom Road, kitty-corner from the East Dorset post office, the Wilson House has been operated as a 501(c) (3) nonprofit foundation since 1986. Though it’s not affiliated with AA, and therefore is not bound by the same principles of anonymity, its stated purpose is to serve as a retreat and educational center for recovering alcoholics, and others who are interested in the principles of a Twelve Step program. The Wilson House is not a crisis center or a rehab facility of any kind. Rather, it’s a simple gathering place for sober folks: a meetinghouse that hosts individual guests, groups, seminars and a regular schedule of AA and Twelve Step meetings. On any given day, at almost any given time, you can find a recovering alcoholic—or dozens of them—sitting in a meeting, on the well-worn couches or shooting the breeze on the broad porch. In the front parlor, the room where Wilson was born, a lamp shines around the clock.
To alcoholics and addicts who believe AA saved their lives—a pretty common perception for people who are sober, instead of dead or dead drunk—East Dorset is like a secular Mecca or Bethlehem. People come from all over the world to spend the night or to attend a meeting at the Wilson House, and to pay their respects at his grave. And more than a few local alcoholics have a sense of destiny about living here. “I had no clue about the Wilson House in my drinking days,” says a Manchester woman who’s now four years sober. (AA asks its members to “always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.”) “When I finally hit bottom, I flew out to Minnesota and checked into a 28-day rehab. I wanted to get as far away from here as possible. And I had no idea, until I came home, that I lived a few miles from one of the country’s most famous AA meetinghouses—the place where Bill was born. I’ve come to believe it’s no coincidence; that God brought me here. For reasons that someday may become clear to me, I was intended to get drunk—and then get sober—in East Dorset, Vermont.”
