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Featured Article Of The Week

Fernald State School


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Social reformer Samuel Gridley Howe founded the school in 1848 with a $2,500 appropriation from the Legislature. Records of Dr. Howe and the beginnings of mental retardation services in the United States reside in Fernald’s Howe Library. Under its first resident superintendent, Walter E. Fernald (1887-1924), the school became a model educational facility in the field of mental retardation. In 1925, the Legislature passed a bill officially naming the school the Walter E. Fernald State School. In it's later years it became involved with various experiments that came to light in the 1990's where doctors at the hospital were conducting radiation experiments on the patients living there. It is slowly closing due to an ever decreasing patient population.

The Walter E. Fernald State School, the oldest institution for the retarded in the country, began operation in Massachusetts in 1848 as the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children.

Prior to the establishment of the school, the governor had appointed three Commissioners of Idiocy to inquire on the "condition of idiots in the commonwealth and if anything can be done for them" (Resolves 1846, c 117). The commission's report, written by Samuel G. Howe of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind led to an experimental school being funded for three years by the state (Resolves 1848, c 65) and administered by the trustees of the Perkins Institution. The legislature incorporated it as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded? Youth in 1850 (St 1850, c 150). Click here for more...