On a humid August day in the small mountain town of McCaysville, Georgia, Sandy Dearth stands in front of the building where, 53 years ago, a nurse secretly and illegally handed her out a back window to a pair of eager and nervous adoptive parents. Sandy, who has not been back here since that day in 1963, is holding her husband Bill's hand tightly. A lifetime of searching has led her to this moment.

The building she faces is divided into several units: at one end rests a BBQ joint, at the other a pizza place. In between, poison ivy grows along the peeling painted brick walls and a faded FOR RENT sign hangs in the window. This forlorn space is where the Hicks Community Clinic once operated. In addition to providing standard healthcare for members of this declining mining town, the clinic offered clandestine abortions and adoptive services to desperate girls and young women. Sandy's biological mother was one of them.

Sandy Dearth and her husband Bill view the former Hicks Community Clinic, the site of Sandy's birth and illegal adoption | (Matthew Steven Bruen/Courtesy Narratively)

"The person that bore me," she says, her blue-green eyes shining, "how must they have felt? Were they scared? Did they have to? Did they want to? Were they forced to? Why didn't they abort me? What happened? Are they alive?" She pauses, catches her breath. This is the closest she has ever come to this phantom woman. Despite a gulf of 50-plus years, Sandy feels her presence here.

She walks around to the alley behind the building and pauses in front of the window where she was passed to her now deceased adoptive parents all those years ago. Tears again fall down her face. She breathes deeply, and steels herself.

"I can't believe my parents actually came down here and did this." She laughs. It is a light-hearted sound, one full of love. "Knowing that this was all illegal. I mean, I know my parents. My parents would not do this, OK? They wouldn't even throw a piece of paper out the window of their car. No way. And they drove down in the middle of the night? Only had this many hours to come get a baby. Got me through a window! Holy cow. 'And do not contact anyone,' they said to them, 'we'll forge you a birth certificate.' And they did this?"

Side door of the now abandoned Hicks Clinic | (Matthew Steven Bruen/Courtesy Narratively)

Indeed they did, along with the adoptive parents of approximately 212 other children who have become known as the Hicks Babies, after Dr. Thomas Jugarthy Hicks.

Starting in 1955 and running through the early 1960s, Hicks offered secretive abortions and adoptions here. Eventually, in 1964, he was caught performing an abortion and was summarily stripped of his medical license. He died in 1972 and it took three decades before Hicks' actions were brought to light. In 1997, news of the scandal broke, as several Hicks Babies began digging into their past. The story made national news, resurfacing again in 2014, when the Babies teamed up with Ancestry.com and ABC News to conduct DNA tests on themselves and members of the nearby community. The researchers made several matches, and the Babies met many long-lost cousins and siblings. A very small number were reconnected with their birth parents.

Although their search for their origins has been documented — some might even say exploited — what remains unseen is the powerful relationship the Hicks Babies share with each other and to the place that is and isn't their hometown. It is a story punctuated by emotional reunions with individuals who have spent decades helping to undo the damage caused so many years ago. And it is a story of the unique and deep comradeship that has arisen amongst this most unusual of groups.

When Dr. Hicks began his illicit practice, abortions were illegal in the United States. The poverty here in the Copper Basin of southeast Tennessee and far north Georgia, which includes the town of McCaysville, often meant that pregnant women couldn't ask a relative or friend to help raise their children. The extra mouths to feed were simply too expensive. Stories of young girls dying from botched abortions in the early '50s still exist in the living memories of those from the region. It is possible that deaths like these convinced Dr. Hicks that something needed to be done.

"Hicks was providing a service," says Ken Rush flatly. Rush is the director of the Ducktown Basin Museum, a small institution devoted to preserving the history of the area. He sits at a table with his hands resting calmly in front of him. Directly behind him is a display case filled with the various chemicals manufactured in the factories that once served as the area's primary economic engines.

"If there was no demand for the service," Rush continues, "Hicks would not have been doing it. He wasn't going around knocking girls up and holding them hostage in his apartment until they delivered their babies so he could sell them." Like many people who live and work in the Copper Basin, Rush is frustrated by sensationalist portrayals of Dr. Hicks.

"But people believe that." His voice drops and he imitates a morally outraged newscaster: "'He's sellin' babies!' No, he did not keep records. Why would he keep records? The second the adoption was completed and the family took the child he got rid of any paper trail." It is this gap that fuels the conspiracy theorists, according to Rush.

Rush rejects the rumors that Hicks intentionally impregnated young girls, put them up in his home, and then sold his own children for profit. He rejects the claim that Hicks became incredibly wealthy because of his actions. And he rejects the belief that Hicks hid his records somewhere and that they are out there, waiting to be found.

"Look," he states, "it's all very simple. Word got out. There's a doctor in the mountains. Call him, he can help you. It's not exciting. It's not scandalous. And what do we like as a society? We like scandal. We like dirty laundry. We like it to be nefarious."

Read the rest of this story at Narratively.

Narratively is a digital publication and creative studio focused on ordinary people with extraordinary stories.