Thomas J. Lamb was born in Ireland in 1865. Lamb and his wife, Elizabeth Brown, an immigrant from England, were furriers and tailors in Baltimore, Maryland, before moving to Asheville, North Carolina, in 1916. In September 1918, Lamb had a psychotic break, threatening to kill his wife and later attacking a man named Patrick McIntyre. In the wake of the attack, Buncombe County officials declared him insane but were unable to place Lamb in the any of the state asylums due to the fact that he did not meet the requirements for state citizenship. County officials became so desperate to be rid of Lamb that deputy sheriff Thomas R. Parker personally escorted him back to Baltimore and literally abandoned him in a tailor shop in the city before catching the train back to Asheville. Enraged, Baltimore authorities put Lamb on a train and sent him back to Asheville, where he was placed back into the county jail. The game of bureaucratic hot potato continued as county officials next tried to have him repatriated to Ireland, but as he had been out of the country so long—more than forty years—they refused to receive him. At this point, Lamb became known as "the man without a country" in newspaper reports that widely circulated the state. After three years of incarceration, Lamb was finally admitted to the State Hospital at Morganton. It took a special act of the state legislature to make it happen. He died there in 1934.