My Family’s Dark, Hidden History With Institutionalization

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 my visit. Would she have been disappointed by who her grandfather really was? Vindicated? In denial? I only knew she would have been proud of me for trying to understand our family history. Now, as she was being interred beside Walter, I recognized all the names on the back of the stone. I knew the story. I remembered.

But as I stepped back from the gravestone, I felt my foot drop onto stone instead of grass. I looked down and saw I was standing on a barely visible mud-caked slab with a name I didn’t recognize: “Barbara M. Fernald 1921–1935.” I called to my mother, “Ma, who is this?” She came over and together we scraped the mud off with our soles. She didn’t know, perhaps a cousin of my grandmother’s who had died young. What had kept her name off the central stone? Beside Barbara’s stone I noticed an even smaller square with no words on it—a nameless grave.

Who was Barbara? Who lay beneath that bare slab? Soon after my grandmother’s funeral, Alex Green, a fellow researcher I had met through my work, contacted me. Alex, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University who was then finishing a book about my great-great-grandfather, had commiserated with my struggles with the state’s exceptionally restrictive records law. He had sued the state to get access to records from Fernald that were over 100 years old and, in order to view them, agreed to have his notes checked each day to make sure he wasn’t recording confidential patient information. He was so frustrated by the obfuscation that he persuaded the Legislature to create a Special Commission on State Institutions to study, among other things, the state’s actions with regard to records and offer recommendations for ways to improve access to them. Signed into law in July 2022, the 15-person commission—the nation’s first disability rights-led human rights inquiry into the legacy of institutionalization—met for the first time in June 2023.

“This may be a bit of a shock,” he now told me, “but I am fairly certain Fernald had two grandchildren who died in institutions for children with intellectual disabilities.” He had come across offhand references to them in his research. Tom Fernald, my grandmother’s uncle, had two children who both had PKU, a now-treatable genetic condition that causes toxic buildup of the amino acid phenylalanine and leads to progressive brain damage. Barbara Fernald had died at age 13 at a private facility in Pennsylvania in March 1935. Her younger brother Winton had been admitted to Fernald’s sister school, the Wrentham State School, where he died at age 21 in June of 1946. That was all Alex had.

The private facility in Pennsylvania was long closed, and according to the local historical society, its records had almost certainly been destroyed or lost. But I knew Winton’s records must be out there, in some basement archive, but that the state was not going to give me access to them, even though I was related to him and he was long dead.

This restriction was not only absurd but hypocritical. I knew, despite the state’s supposed emphasis on protecting patients’ identities, that thousands of records from as recent as the 1990s had been left on the abandoned grounds of the Fernald for hordes of trespassers to steal and vandalize. I knew it because I’d seen the documents myself.

A couple months after my grandmother’s death, on a cold January morning in 2023, I sat in a car outside the metal gate leading to abandoned acres of the Fernald. I watched Bryan Parcival, a local photographer and Fernald historian I’d befriended through my research, jostle the gate’s lock. “If this doesn’t work we’ll have to hike on,” he said as he shook and twisted the key. With a sudden crack, the lock opened and fell to the ground. He pushed open the groaning gates and hopped back into the driver’s seat. “I got this key five years ago when the state had me take photos of this place. The guy who gave it to me, some maintenance man, died a few weeks later, so no one knows I have this.” He lifted the little silver key up to my face and smiled. “You ready?” he asked, and without waiting for my reply, he drove us past the “No Trespassing” signs and onto the property no one in my family had set foot on in decades.

I followed Bryan’s footsteps as he darted across the buckling wood floors into the Asylum building, which once served as the institution’s main hospital. Mountains of rusted wheelchairs lay crumpled on their sides beside wooden restraint chairs with thick black ropes. Spilling from cabinets was a stream of papers that lay beside books with broken spines, children’s drawings of butterflies, sheet music for “Ode to Joy,” forks, knives, and spoons. I picked up one of the loose papers, a patient record from 1995 titled “Psychotropic Medical Treatment Plan” with a person’s name, birthday, medications, symptoms, and a diagnosis of “chronic schizophrenia” clearly visible. It was one of thousands like it that dotted the floor.

Of course, the campus was technically off-limits. But in 2020 and 2021, the cameras Bryan had set up around the property recorded more than 5,300 incidents of trespassing, during which buildings were frequently damaged and records were stolen, urinated on, and graffitied. One video showed people shooting pornography in the abandoned library that had once housed one of the largest collections of disability literature in the nation. He shared all of this with the City of Waltham, which has owned the property since the institution’s closure. Nothing happened. A police spokesperson told me that they were unable to secure the property due to its size. Urban explorers shared their adventures openly on social media. A local teenager told me it was a rite of passage for kids in the city to visit the campus and that he personally had multiple boxes of patient records in his room that he had swiped. “Do you want to see them?” he asked.

I wrote an article in early 2024 for The Boston Globe about these blatant violations of both HIPAA and the state’s own more restrictive records law that had taken place with the knowledge of the state and the city. The Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services (DDS) blamed the state’s Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) for failing to remove the records in 2014. The DCAMM responded by shifting the blame back to the DDS. Meanwhile, Waltham’s mayor stayed mum. The article changed little for the campus itself. Over the past two years, some of its oldest buildings have been destroyed by arson, and the town has opened a park on a corner of the property that includes miniature golf and a train. The state did remove thousands of records from the campus. According to Caitlin Ramos, the curator at the Massachusetts State Archives, they were extremely damaged and were ultimately all destroyed by the DDS.

But the article did have one major effect: People who were desperate to get some information about loved ones who had died at the Fernald began to reach out to me. One had heard that his sister had choked to death on peanut butter while she wasn’t being properly supervised, another wanted to track down a beloved aunt who had vanished during his childhood, and another had recently discovered that he had a cousin he had never been told about, and he wanted to find his unmarked grave and buy a proper headstone. The state had previously rebuffed them all, telling them it was to protect the privacy of the patients. What privacy was there on the moldy floors of the Fernald?

One of those who had been denied access was Susan Ruderman, a 64-year-old fifth-generation Bostonian who had long known that her mother, Betty, had a missing sibling. In January 1933, when Betty was 4, her half-brother didn’t come home after school. “Where’s Larry?” she recalled her older brother asking. Their mother turned to the two children and barked, “Never speak of him again!”

Despite her mother’s admonition, Betty occasionally mentioned her long-lost sibling to her daughter. In 2019, years after Betty’s death, Susan became concerned that she might be a carrier of PKU and decided to track down what happened to the lost boy, whose name was all she had to go by. Combing through the 1940 US Census, she found an entry for Lawrence Barry. He was listed as a resident of the Fernald. A request to the state archives for his records led to a typical bureaucratic response: She was told that she needed to hire a lawyer, go to court to prove lineage, and be appointed guardian of his estate. It was too much; she begrudgingly let Larry slip back into the well of silence where he’d sat for decades.

But in May 2025, the Special Commission on State Institutions that Alex had helped start and which he served as vice chair of, released its final report on the decades of mistreatment and disregard for records and graves at the Fernald and other state institutions. In response, in November of that year, Governor Maura Healey signed a law that opened the state’s institutional records to families and researchers 75 years after their creation or, if still held by the DDS or the Department of Mental Health, 50 years after the death of the patient. Alex estimates that 75 to 100 million formerly hidden records were found, received, and opened to the public and that more than 1,000 people have been able to access the story of their loved ones. (The state archive did not immediately keep track of access to institutional records under the new law, but between July 1 and October 13 of this year, 143 people received records; the vast majority are family members of former patients.) The new law also temporarily paused the destruction of documents, a de facto admission that the state had been destroying them. Massachusetts, once one of the most restrictive states for access to institutional records, overnight became one of the most transparent.

Susan made a new request and received Larry’s records within days. There was no evidence of PKU in Larry’s records, but what they did reveal was that he was admitted to the Fernald in 1933 at the age of 8 as a “neglected child,” and that he was determined to escape. A medical note dated November 17, 1933, a few months after he was brought to the Fernald, indicated that he was constantly getting into fights and sprinting from the campus into the surrounding neighborhoods. According to the records, after he was brought back on one occasion, he said, “[I’m] posted anyway, so what’s the use of being good?” The file documents years of constant escapes from wards, infirmaries, haylofts, and, once, from a bean patch on the school’s farm. He stole bikes, made it to train stations, and was caught by local residents and police in towns near and far. He was continually being brought back. His yearly files often ended with the same two sentences: “He had no visitors and no correspondence. Clothing is free.”

After an escape when he was 18, the institution gave up on tracking him down. The file continues with notes that the Fernald staff occasionally received phone calls reporting that he was in and out of prisons and other institutions. The final accessible record was from January 1951, when a Waltham police officer questioned a suspicious-looking man at the employee residence at the Fernald; the man claimed that he was a sailor from California and thought the place was a hotel. In fact, he was Larry Barry, returning to the place he hated so much that he’d escaped a hundred times but that was also the only home he’d ever known. The unnamed staff member who wrote the note told the police officer that Larry was not a patient anymore and “they were free to deal with him as they saw fit.” Larry was taken away by the police.

While many questions are left unanswered, Susan says this access was an unbelievable gift—an opportunity to finally get a glimpse of a family member who had been relegated to oblivion since that cold January day in 1933. She is determined to find out what happened to him after he was taken by the Waltham police in 1951, to find his grave, and, if necessary, give it a proper stone.

Just as it did for Susan and the dozens of other people who reached out to me for help, the change in the law meant I could access not only Walter Fernald’s records but also those of his grandson. Within a matter of days, I received Winton’s records from the DDS in an e-mail. It included his autopsy report, which gave him a mental age of 2 years and 10 months and a diagnosis of “imbecile,” a series of medical and psychological notes from his admission at the age of 1 to his death 20 years later, and two photos: one at age 7, standing in a field with a mischievous smile on his face, and another at age 20, in an oversize suit with a large white handkerchief protruding awkwardly from the chest pocket, staring grimly down against a black background. The records show that Winton was constantly shredding his clothes and, as he grew older, smashing his fists into windows. He often had to get stitches on his knuckles. He occasionally had visitors, but his parents, perhaps because of the trauma of institutionalizing two of their children, moved to Florida shortly after his birth and apparently rarely visited Massachusetts.

Wrentham was founded and run by one of Walter Fernald’s closest protégés, Dr. George Wallace. It is very likely that this is why Winton was brought there, and perhaps, though the records don’t reflect this, he received special attention because of his last name. But after Wallace’s sudden death in 1930, Wrentham, like most institutions in the period coinciding with the Great Depression and then the Second World War, had scant funding and dangerously few employees. One staff member per 50 residents was common. Whatever special attention he might have had was likely gone—it is no wonder he kept smashing his fist into windows.

In the final pages of his records, I found proof that Winton was indeed buried under that small stone square at the family plot at Mount Auburn. The files have no mention of his grandfather, the man who had bought that plot, whose name had been bestowed on the institution a few miles down the road, and who had helped create the very system of institutionalization in which his grandson had died. No, it just says Winton died with his mother at his bedside, that he was cremated and buried beside his sister, Barbara, laid to rest 10 years earlier. Unlike her, he did not get a name.

These records cannot do much. Written in the institution’s removed hand, they cannot truly tell his experience, what he was like, what he thought or felt or desired. His life was just one drop in a great ocean of forgotten lives. But is that so special? Despite our best attempts to archive the past, to keep the records from rotting, from potter’s fields to Mount Auburn, from institutions to families, isn’t forgetting the one inevitable thing?

But even so, why do I keep looking at the sad photographs of this faraway boy? What do I want from these “horror stories”? Why do I keep reading and rereading the records, especially returning to the rare moments when he speaks? Such as the January 3, 1941, examination in which he kept repeating, “So glad I’m going home” and “I hate this damn dump.” Or on November 12, 1935, when he kept begging the nurse, “Turn light on, Miss. It’s dark, Miss.” The game, the report says, was an “obsession with him and it was practically impossible to get him to stop.” He jumped up and down and up and down, flicking the light on and off and on and off, answering questions at random, until he finally declared, “No more.”