Fernald State School

Founded in 1848 as the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, this complex was the Western hemisphere’s oldest publicly funded institution serving people with developmental disabilities. The school’s name changed to Fernald State School in honor of its third superintendent, Walter Fernald, a major advocate of eugenics who believed all “imbeciles” and “morons” (medical terms at the time) must be separated from society and prevented from procreating. The complex grew to 72 buildings and almost 200 acres in size, and was considered a model school for educating of developmentally disabled children.

Living conditions at Fernald grew steadily worse in the 20th century, with reports of physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and overcrowding. It was less a school and more a prison for young people that the state of Massachusetts didn’t know what to do with. Many of the “students” were actually of normal intelligence, and were committed simply because they were poor, uneducated orphans. Those who attempted to escape the abuse were kept in solitary confinement in Ward 22.

Perhaps the most sordid episode in Fernald’s checkered history is the radiation experiments, performed jointly by Harvard and MIT and sponsored, strangely enough, by Quaker Oats. Between 1946 and 1953, over sixty children were injected with radioactive isotopes of calcium and iron in order to track nutrient absorption. The doses were very low, and unlikely to have negatively affected the children. However, neither the children nor their parents ever gave informed consent, and the decision to perform experiments on institutionalized children has been heavily criticized. A 1995 lawsuit resulted in a $1.85 million settlement from MIT and Quaker Oats.

The complex evolved into a center for developmentally disabled adults into the twenty-first century, but finally closed its doors in 2014.