MetFern Cemetery Project

07/05/2025

America's first Disability Pride Day was celebrated 35 years ago in Boston. For the first time, you can read the story behind it here. One of the organizers, Sybil Feldman, aka "Sybil Disobedience" had been held as an inmate of the Fernald School for her entire youth and spent her later years fighting to shut institutions down and serving the Boston Center for Independent Living.

As the nation's first disability pride event turns 35, a founder, attendee, and speaker look back

07/05/2025

Our MetFern Cemetery page exists to ensure all disabled people are remembered with respect, with love, with the rituals in death that everyone deserves, and we have so often been denied. If you can, please chip in to make sure Hector, who went to Waltham Public Schools, has a tombstone.

As many of you may know, little hector passed away back in may due to complications wit… Michelle Sheehan needs your support for A tombstone for little hector

06/11/2025

Today's GBH News featured a powerful discussion about institutions, disability human rights, and the failures of the state. You can watch and listen here. https://www.youtube.com/live/NiXhqPkc9uA?feature=shared&t=3995

06/06/2025

For 41 years, the state withheld the names of 298 disabled people buried from 1947-1979 in the Fernald School and Metropolitan State Hospital's institutional cemetery. Institutional employees and residents walked past it without doing anything. Most of the disabled dead who are buried here were locked away for life in conditions of enslavement, sexual violence, torture, and abuse.

As this powerful piece in The Boston Globe this month shows, it was high school students working with teachers Alex Green, Yoni Kadden, and Kevin Levin, who broke down those barriers. (though contrary to the piece, they were not given the names by the state...they tracked them down).

As Elissa Ely writes:

"As part of a 'disability history' class, they [then] petitioned for legal permission to pore through census records; birth, death, and immigration certificates; marriage licenses; and draft documents, and then published their remarkable findings on a web page. Numbers became lives; a paragraph for each grave. The facts are reported with such care, it is as if the researchers wore gloves to cradle the details."

There are 14,000 more graves like this statewide. Support and honor the work of these students by asking your state rep to co-sponsor and pass H.3335 and your state senator to co-sponsor and pass S.2102 and begin to live the shameful veil that keeps the idea of institutionalizing disabled people alive by hiding the past about how they lived and died in those institutions.

Find your legislator by putting in your address here: https://malegislature.gov/Search/FindMyLegislator
Link to House Bill: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/H3335
Link to Senate Bill: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/S2102

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/31/opinion/essay-metfern-cemetery-burials/

The facts are reported with such care, it is as if the researchers wore gloves to cradle the details.

05/23/2025

An incredibly powerful statement from the largest disability rights group in Massachusetts, the The Arc of Massachusetts about the report by the Special Commission on State Institutions.

"The Special Commission on State Institutions’ report affirms what so many survivors and families have known for years – that we cannot move forward without a reckoning of the full truth of our past and the painful legacy of institutionalization. We must fully acknowledge and understand what happened at places like the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center in Waltham and other state institutions, where people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) were too often subjected to neglect, isolation, and harm.

This moment is not only about remembrance – it is about recommitting to the rights and dignity of people with IDD today and protecting individuals from the mistakes of the past. That includes embracing transparency, respectfully memorializing former institutional grounds, and supporting education that centers on those impacted. At a time when disability rights are being eroded and access to services is under threat, this report reminds us of the risks of going back. We must remain committed to a future where people with IDD live in the community and achieve their greatest potential, with full inclusion and the support of community-based services."

Through advocacy, programs that promote inclusion, and engaging the community, The Arc creates tangible changes in the community and in the lives of people with disabilities.

05/22/2025

The world's first disability-led truth commission on the history of state institutions for disabled people has published its report on Massachusetts, including the Fernald School and Met State Hospital, which shared the use of the MetFern Cemetery. The findings are shocking.

Thousands of disabled people are buried in unmarked graves across Massachusetts, according to a legislative commission.

05/18/2025

Some folks have asked what kinds of leaders would want to whitewash the history of abuse of disabled children at a place like the Fernald School. One kind is the kind who still thinks intellectually disabled people should be called the "r-word." Here's an example (text from video below):

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed “Rosa’s Law” ending the U.S. Government’s use of the r-word, a slur for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Kathy McMenimen disagrees with Rosa’s Law. Today, the fate of the site where America’s first school for people with intellectual disabilities, the Fernald School, once stood, is in the hands of people like her. She is the longest serving city councilor in the history of Waltham, Mass., sometimes known as the Louise Day Hicks of Waltham.

McMenimen never takes a vote on the Fernald and doesn’t have to. Her best friend, Mayor Jeannette McCarthy is doing what they both want…building an amusement part on the site.

Here is audio of McMenimen in 2018, talking to high school students about the disabled people who once lived at the school, and her love for the r-word…

“When I show you pictures, you’ll understand what profoundly r*****d means, okay?

I do not like the term ‘intellectual disabilities. I completely disagree with that term because most of the people and the residents—3 4, 500 of them who lived at Fernald and other institutions—were profoundly limited, not just intellectually. They had multiple issues.”

This recording was made in 2018. McMenimen was fully aware that she was being recorded at the time.

05/17/2025

Thank you to the many disabled folks and allies who stood together to protest the erasure of the Fernald School's history today. As many pointed out, by building the city's only accessible playground there--rather than making the city's many playgrounds accessible--Waltham has continued the tradition of the Fernald School by asking families to segregate their disabled children into one city park, next to a "memorial" that does not mention a single thing about anything the thousands of dead and abused disabled people held as inmates of the Fernald School. Our history will not be erased.

05/16/2025

Tomorrow (Saturday)

05/09/2025

"the simple fact is that disability is it at odds with our ideas about the American dream, about the idea that you work hard and then you succeed, and you get your rewards, because many of us cannot work in the conventional ways that nondisabled people can, and faced with a group of people who don’t fit with the vision of that myth, non-disabled Americans have ruthlessly taken every opportunity over the last century and beyond to try to push disabled people back out of sight, because we don’t fit with common notions of efficiency or cosmetic beauty or other things we value most in society today."

A new book by Harvard Law School Project on Disability Fellow Alex Green looks at the life and career of Walter Fernald