Portal:Featured Article Of The Week
Featured Article Of The Week
Fernald State School
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.Click here for more...