Vermont governor Redfield Proctor never forgot the tuberculosis (TB) that afflicted him during the Civil War, and when one of his young sons was stricken with TB, he became interested in medical treatments for the disease. While serving as Vermont's U.S. senator in Washington, D.C., in 1905 he announced plans to build the Vermont Sanatorium for Incipient Tuberculosis in Pittsford, and to equip, staff, and endow it with one hundred thousand dollars as a gift to the state. Proctor appointed a board, which commissioned architects Scopes and Fuestmann of Saranac Lake. Former tuberculosis patients themselves, the architects were then designing new buildings for Dr. Trudeau, who founded the first tuberculosis sanatorium in the United States in Sar-anac Lake in 1885. By the time of Proctor's gift, dozens of sanatoria had opened based on Trudeau's European “rest cure” model, which prescribed lots of fresh air to combat the disease.

Scopes and Fuestmann developed a grand Colonial Revival scheme in brick composed of a two-and-a-half-story central hospital connected to two-story end-pavilion dormitories with terminal porches by single-story, glassed curving hyphens, where patients were lined up on sunny days with the windows open. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. selected the building site and laid out the grounds at the south edge of the broad level hilltop east of Pitts-ford village. The facility opened on December 16, 1907, admitting up to fifty patients for the modest sum of seven dollars per week and an average stay of six months. With additional Proctor family endowments, the facility was taken over by the State of Vermont in May 1921. The following year Redfield Proctor Jr. and Emily Proctor joined other Rutland-area philanthropists to build the Caverly Preventorium for children just west of the sanatorium. It was named after Pittsford native Dr. Charles S. Caverly, who was well known for his work on preventing TB in children. The preventorium's one-and two-story, wood-frame, Colonial Revival buildings consist of a one-room school, small hospital, staff house, multicar garage, and two dormitories each with three two-story sleeping porches. As tuberculosis was nearly eradicated in the United States after World War II, the preventorium was abandoned and the sanatorium was eventually converted to the Vermont Police Academy.