Collection on the Walter E. Fernald State School

The Walther E. Fernald State School, also known as the Fernald Developmental Center, was the oldest publicly funded institution in the western hemisphere to serve developmentally disabled people. It operated at 200 Trapelo Road in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1889 to 2014.

Samuel Gridley Howe, a reformer who also founded the Perkins School for the Blind, founded the school in South Boston in 1848. Originally called the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, the school's mission was to help mentally disabled children grow into productive, responsible citizens. To that end, Howe developed an education that included classroom and manual training as well as athletics, dancing, and music therapy. By the 1870s, the school had outgrown its location and land was purchased in Waltham, near Waverley Square.

Walter E. Fernald served as the school's third superintendent from 1888 to 1924, and the school was renamed in his honor in 1925. During his tenure, Fernald became an internationally renowned authority on mental disabilities, developing innovative medical treatments for the disabled and further shaping the idea of special education. However, for a time he was also a proponent of eugenics, the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through the selective breeding of certain populations. Though Fernald later changed course and even became an opponent of mass institutionalization, damage had been done and the school named in his honor fell away from its idealistic founding mission. The Fernald School became a site of various human rights abuses, including forced institutionalization, sexual abuse, and nonconsensual participation in experiments involving ingesting radiation.

In 2003, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney announced the closing of the Fernald Developmental Center, indicating the center would officially shut its doors by 2007. A group of resident advocates and their families fought the closing, and were able to keep it open for several more years. The final resident left in 2014.

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Sources:

-Marie E. Daly, "History of the Walter E. Fernald Development Center," 2005

-Alex Green, "A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled," 2025

-Eli Sherman, "End of an era: Last resident leaves Fernald Center in Waltham," Waltham News Tribune, 2014 November 14

-Dr. Anna M. Wallace, "History of the Walter E. Fernald State School," 1948