MetFern Cemetery Project

12/13/2025

What if your entire perception of disabled people was built 110 years ago by a bunch of people who hated disabled people?

It was. And it was called “The Menace of the Feeble-Minded.”

Pamphlet from approximately 1915 in Worcester, Massachusetts which helped lead to the creation of a massive asylum “school” in Belchertown, Mass. where thousands of purportedly “defective delinquent feebleminded” people later lived and died.

[Text of images]

A FEW FACTS

To Call Your Attention to the

Urgent Need of

More Adequate Provision

Being Made for the

Care of the Feeble-Minded

And of Making Active the Law We Now Have Providing for the

CARE OF DEFECTIVE

DELINQUENTS

Why Care for the Feeble- Minded?

1

They are a Menace to the Home

2

They are a Menace to the School

3

They are a Menace to the Community

What Shall We Do With These

Unfortunate People ?

Such Girls as These Should be Saved

B., fifteen years old, is rather large for her age. She is quite good looking. She can read and write a very little. Beside being very defective, she is diseased. Two years ago the mother, after much persuasion, made application to Waverley. The girl is still at home because there is no room in the State Schools. Shall we allow her to reproduce her kind?

L. is thirteen years old. She cannot attend public school because she disturbs the class. Her older sister and brother are in reform schools. She herself is becoming wayward. Her mother has plead with the Social Agencies to do something with her daughter before she gets into trouble. Her application has been on the urgent list since April of 1912. There is no room.

These Girls Should have Been Saved

R. is nineteen years old. Her illegitimate baby was born last May.

Experts say she has the mentality of a girl of seven.

She is so inefficient she cannot make a living for herself. She is to-day being aided by Charity. She cannot be admitted to Wav-erley because there is no room.

I. is a bright, attractive girl, but is mentally quite defective. Her father applied to have her admitted to Waverley about a year ago, but there was no room.

Twice within the year he asked the school to admit her, but was refused for the same reason. Recently she was enticed away by a man, who had a serious disease. She is now at home, a great burden to her parents and a danger to the community.

N. is just twenty-one years old; has had her second illegitimate child. She has very little sense of right or wrong. Her father made application to Waverley, but there is no room. She is a great burden to the home.

Another Type

M.'s father is vicious. His mother is defec-tive. He himself, an illegitimate child, is feeble-minded and has congenital syphilis.

He cannot do even elementary work in school.

He is vicious and abuses children smaller than himself.

The children of the neighborhood should be protected from such a boy.

This year about 25,000 children are enrolled in the Worcester schools. With the conservative estimate that 1% of the population of Massachusetts is feeble-minded, the conclusion is that there are about 250 defective children in our schools.

THE NEED

1 A legislative appropriation for a new school for the feeble-minded.

2 A legislative appropriation to make active the defective delinquent departments of our corrective institutions. How to Supply the Need

1 Arouse public sentiment by showing this to someone else.

2 Write your legislator and insist that he vote for these appropriations when the bills come before the Legislature.

12/07/2025

This week's edition of (Un)Hidden: Disability Histories and our World delves into major victories advancing disability justice in Massachusetts that we've been proud to lead with so many other disabled folks. Link to read and listen below and in comments:

https://unhidden.substack.com/p/major-victories-in-advancing-disability

12/06/2025

Our work in the Boston Globe:

Records from Massachusetts’ infamous institutions, where generations of people experienced mistreatment and abuse, are dramatically more accessible thanks to a new state law.

Advocates and loved ones of people who were abused in the institutions say the law is ending what for some have been years of frustrating efforts to learn the history of relatives who lived in these homes.

Records from Massachusetts’ infamous institutions, where generations of people experienced mistreatment and abuse, are dramatically more accessible thanks to a new state law.

Advocates and loved ones of people who were abused in the institutions say the law is ending what for some have been years of frustrating efforts to learn the history of relatives who lived in these homes.

“It’s a bit bittersweet,” said Kim Turner, a Newburyport woman whose grandfather and great-grandmother both lived at Waltham’s now shuttered Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center. “Something that I’ve been really wanting to know about for decades, it seems like we’re right on the cusp of being able to get that information.”

Newly accessible records also may provide a warning of how dehumanizing large-scale institutionalization can be as budget cuts threaten home care services, said Alex Green, a lecturer on disability rights and a key member of a commission that authored a report earlier this year about state policies that obscured the full history of the state institutions.

The law, signed by Governor Maura Healey at the end of November in a supplementary budget measure, came out of that report. Green said he and other advocates have sought more records access for close to a decade, despite there being little public opposition. The state is notoriously slow to pass legislation.

With the law’s signing, state hospital records are now available to a resident’s family members or academic researchers as long as the subject of the records has been deceased for 50 years. The general public will have access if the documents are at least 75 years old and the subject has been deceased for at least 50 years.

Disability rights advocates, Green said, “intend to use what is found in this work as a direct challenge to what we all predict are going to be significant cuts to services that allow people to stay in their homes.”

The law doesn’t address every recommendation from the commission, Green said. The commission’s report recommended a museum, memorials, and education to preserve the experiences of institutions’ residents, and an official apology from the governor. Reggie Clark, 72, a disability rights advocate who lived at Fernald from early childhood to 1969, said he plans to continue to push for some form of memorial. The state needs a prominent, visible reminder of who lived in these homes and what their lives were like.

“Who else is going to do it if I don’t do it,” he said.

For much of the 19th century and into the 2010s, Massachusetts operated about two dozen schools, hospitals, and other residential facilities for people labeled intellectually or mentally disabled. Legal obstacles, privacy restrictions, and poor record-keeping all have made it difficult, and in many cases nearly impossible, for relatives or descendants of the people who lived in these facilities to obtain their family’s full history. Even living survivors of the state institution system have had trouble getting their own files.

A new law will dramatically increase access to records from Massachusetts' infamous institutions.

11/20/2025

Progress! Next up, the Governor's desk...

11/12/2025

Our disability human rights work is featured in "The Great Read" section of the New York Times today. To read more about the Fernald School:

https://www.blpress.org/books/a-perfect-turmoil/

We hope that this one story of someone getting records about a dead disabled loved one that have been withheld from the state will translate into other folks getting them, too.

The story here is sadly the tip of the iceberg and the fight to get just this one set of records was something brutal in ways that are spared for readers here.

In this very moment, an amendment before the legislature has to change for that to happen and they have to make a decisive choice in the next few weeks...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/fernald-state-school-disabled-people.html

John Scott was rarely spoken of in his family after he was placed in an institution. After a half-century, his youngest brother set out to learn who he was and what happened to him.

10/27/2025

Thank you to the The Arc of Massachusetts for your work to support disability justice!

The Massachusetts Senate has passed legislation that has been a priority for The Arc since we helped pass the special commission on the history of state institutions. We are grateful to Alex Green for his determination in spearheading this effort. Here is CEO Maura Sullivan's statement for the Senate's press release:

"The Arc extends its profound gratitude to Senate President Karen Spilka and Senate Ways and Means Chairman Michael Rodrigues for their leadership in gaining passage of this amendment that will restore dignity to former patients and their families and shine a light of transparency on the history of state institutions. We also wish to recognize Senator Michael Barrett for his steadfast support of the disability community. The Arc helped lead the effort to create the Special Commission on the History of State Institutions and this amendment enacts a key recommendation of that commission. Thank you to our champions in the Senate for addressing a painful chapter in our history by providing closure and public accountability."

https://malegislature.gov/PressRoom/Detail?pressReleaseId=270

10/25/2025

A Major Disability Rights Milestone--The Next Steps Need Your Help

The Massachusetts Senate has passed legislation that we've been spearheading with fellow disability advocates to open up records on disability history for survivors and their descendants, halt the improper destruction of state records about historic abuses until they can be reviewed, and repeal a ghastly century-old law that allows medical schools to claim the bodies of the disabled dead from the state for experimentation if they are not claimed by family. Here's the press release: https://malegislature.gov/PressRoom/Detail?pressReleaseId=270

BUT IT'S NOT LAW YET AND WE NEED YOUR HELP... Here's what's happening...

1. 3 members of the Mass. Senate sit down with 3 members of the House. Each side has a version of a big bill package. The Senate's has our legislation. The House version doesn't.

2. They negotiate to create a combined bill. The House must agree to add this language.

3. It goes to the Governor, who is likely to sign it because she asked for this at our urging.

Send a message to the House's lead negotiator
Rep. Aaron Michlewitz (617) 722-2990. Aaron.M.Michlewitz@mahouse.gov
"Pass all the original disability parts of the Governor's Supplemental Budget package."

09/25/2025

Classified advertisement hiring nurses in January 1943. Massive shortages existed in state institutions during World War II.

09/25/2025

Ties between past and present.

Evidence for Trump's Tylenol claim is weak. Yet no prior administration has cared less about what either autism experts or autistic people have to say

09/23/2025

Learn a bit about MetFern Cemetery and efforts to connect descendants to the disabled dead in this 2019 profile by then-Emerson College journalism student Asia London Palomba

09/21/2025

This Friday in Lexington, Mass., learn more about the life of Walter Fernald, whose ideas shaped our ways of thinking about disability for the last 100 years.

* Please Note: This talk will take place on FRIDAY, September 26, 2025 * From the moment he became superintendent of the nation’s oldest public school for intellectually and developmentally disabled children in 1887 until his death in 1924, Dr. Walter E. Fernald led a wholesale transformation of o...

09/19/2025

The Fernald School site is not the only place in America where a place of major human rights abuses is having its true history whitewashed in lieu of a true reckoning with its meaning. This month's Believer Magazine profile's Pennsylvania's equivalent of the Fernald School--Pennhurst--which is currently used by a private company that hosts a multi-million dollar haunted asylum spectacle in buildings where thousands of disabled people were locked away, tortured, and killed. It also is the site of America's only disability history museum, which no longer stays open when the haunted asylum tours are going because the visitors were stealing artifacts and pi***ng on the floor.

Here's part of the text (link in comments):

Dennis Downey, a former board member of the PMPA and a professor emeritus of history at Millersville University, disagrees with Stenberg’s, Autumn’s, and the other haunters’ claims that this attraction can really be a site of reclamation. “Frankly, it’s a commercial operation and makes several million dollars,” he said. “Those funds do not go to the survivors, many of whom are still around.” None of the three owners openly identify as disabled. (Strine refused to share the attraction’s current profits but said that it was profitable. In the 2024 season, haunters made fourteen dollars an hour.)

There is no outward-facing presentation or marketing by the company that emphasizes Pennhurst’s history or its disabled staff. There is nothing online recommending that disabled people apply for positions. Nothing even about the accessibility of the attraction. Which, during my visit, required squeezing through tight corridors and climbing up and down multiple flights of stairs in near total darkness.

Alex Green, a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and a disability rights advocate, believes that Pennhurst is using the fact that it hires disabled people to “cover the parts of what they’re doing that are really reprehensible,” he said, adding, “If this were really empowering disabled people, [the horror tours] would not play on so many of the most egregious tropes that have historically led to violence against [them]. Let’s not conflate the money with the values.”

To Green, the arguments made by the haunters with disabilities and Stenberg felt reminiscent of those made by showmen, carnies, and performers about the benefits of freak shows for the “freaks” themselves. These shows, which operated from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, displayed people with physical ailments to be gawked at in traveling exhibitions or in museums. Due to the proliferation of unsightly beggar ordinances, today often known as “ugly laws,” which made it illegal for people with a visible disability to be seen in public, these shows became one of the only consistent sources of employment for those with physical disabilities. While now seen as deeply exploitative, the shows were often vehemently defended by the performers themselves. Harvey Boswell, a freak show operator and paraplegic, wrote in the 1950s, “I’m stared at but it doesn’t bother me. Nor does it bother the freaks when they are stared at on their way to the bank to deposit… $100, $150, $200, and even $500 per week.”

Green also stressed to me that the haunters who are reclaiming this space are unlikely to have experienced institutionalization and harm at Pennhurst when it was operating as a state school. Many of Pennhurst’s inmates were nonverbal, had limited to no mobility, and/­or required constant care. These disabilities would preclude their working at the attraction, which requires haunters to complete eight-hour-long shifts on their feet in non-­accessible and dust-filled hallways. Green believes that a thoughtful memorialization of Pennhurst’s history would take into account the perspectives of people with a range of intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities—but especially those who have historically borne the brunt of the violence of state schools such as Pennhurst.