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My Family’s Dark, Hidden History With Institutionalization

My great-great-grandfather was the namesake of an infamous institution for the disabled. From long-neglected records of the property, the lives of forgotten people were uncovered.

On the Fernald campus. From left to right: Walter Jr, Walter Sr., Tom (the eventual father of Barbara and Winton), Helen (my great-grandmother), and Katherine.

There is a single name across the front of my family gravestone: FERNALD. A simple slab tucked beneath a low-hanging spruce, it would be easy to miss among the grand monuments and lush gardens surrounding it at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But for many people in the state, the name it bears can still incite a shiver of terror. It was once invoked by teachers and parents as a threat to misbehaving children: “Keep it up and I’ll send you to the Fernald.”

The Walter E. Fernald State School and Hospital, known to locals as the Fernald, sits on a hill in Waltham, Massachusetts, a few miles down the road from my family’s plot. Now an abandoned heap of earth and brick, from its founding in 1848 until its closure in 2014, the Fernald was the oldest institution for intellectually and developmentally disabled people in the Western Hemisphere. For decades, thousands of disabled, neglected, or “behaviorally troubled” children were brought there; many never left. In the mid-20th century, it became one of the nation’s most infamous institutions after journalists, activists, and lawyers brought to light the squalid conditions inside the Fernald, its neglect of patients, and even the medical experimentation, sponsored by corporations like Quaker Oats, that took place there.

In the spring of 2024, I stood before the family stone as my grandma was being buried. She had died a year earlier, and her name was being added to a long list on the back of the stone which began with that of our patriarch: “Walter E. Fernald.” For 37 years, he was the superintendent of the institution that was then called the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth. When he died, 100 years before his granddaughter did, flags flew at half-mast across the state, The Boston Globe wrote that his life inspired “something approaching to awe,” and the institution he had run took his name—an honor that ultimately cemented his dishonor.

My grandma had been the family archivist: Cabinets in her home office overflowed with yellowed newspaper clippings and family trees printed from her 1992 Macintosh. I never paid much attention when she extolled our Mayflower origins or showed me photographs of scowling ladies who were apparently related to me. But in September 2022, early in my senior year of college, while I was mapping out a thesis about my older brother’s hospitalizations with a brain illness, I remembered the occasional conversations I had had with her about her famous grandfather. A quick Google search sent a shock of shame up my spine—there were a slew of stories about abuse at the institution he had once run, but also damning information about the man himself. He was labeled a “eugenicist,” a “sterilizer,” a “monster.”

This revelation led me to drive up to my grandma’s nursing home in Northampton, Massachusetts, to ask her about him. Her health was declining at this point, but she was adamant that I had it all wrong: Walter Fernald was not a monster; he was a remarkable man who would visit every single resident each night before bedtime and taught service to others  above all. She insisted that there were no “horror stories” to tell, no matter how much I “seem to want them.” I kept replaying that last point over in my head as I drove back to campus, past the fast fading leaves. Did I want them? 

All I knew was that my obsession with Fernald’s legacy only grew. I was lucky that my grandma was such a fastidious record-keeper. I went through her archives, which had been tossed into bankers boxes and were sitting outside in the barn at her old house, and spoke to local historians, but I was only able to view a few of the tens of thousands of records belonging to Fernald that were held in the state’s archives. I could only access the small number that had the patient names redacted due to a draconian Massachusetts law that restricted access to institutional medical records indefinitely—rather than the standard 50 years as specified in the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). That meant that the Fernald records from 1848 were treated the same as those from 2014.

What I was able to uncover complicated both the condemnations of Walter Fernald that I found online and my grandma’s unequivocal praise. He was undoubtedly a fierce supporter of what was then a radical idea: that disabled children should be offered treatment and education rather than being abandoned or neglected by their families. Through his work at the institution and in local school districts, he created the foundations of what we now call special education. But while he was opposed to the practice of forcibly sterilizing residents, he promoted eugenicist ideas about their potential criminality and, for a period of his career, called for their lifelong segregation from the surrounding community. These ideas turned his Waltham institution into the archetype for a national state hospital system—hundreds of sister institutions were established from Maine to California that were designed to permanently warehouse the disabled under the guise of “public safety.” This system—now often forgotten, its abandoned institutions the backdrop to haunted houses or misremembered as asylums (which served the mentally ill and typically had short-term, rather than indefinite, stays)—was among the largest public investments in the country from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. At its peak in 1967, it held nearly 200,000 people, very often against their will; Walter Fernald was one of its original masterminds.

I never got to share what I had learned with my grandma. She died a couple months after........

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