Belchertown State School - Belchertown, MA
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nomadwillie
N 42° 16.432 W 072° 24.833
18T E 713262 N 4683423
Opened in 1922 for mentally disabled boys and girls, closing in 1992 due to conditions and treatment of patients
Waymark Code: WMHJ7Z
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 07/15/2013
Views: 3
The Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded was established in 1922 in Belchertown, Massachusetts. It became known for inhumane conditions and poor treatment of its patients, and became the target of a series of lawsuits prior to its eventual closing in 1992. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
Located at 30 State Street, the 876-acre campus contains ten major buildings built in a Colonial Revival style by Kendall, Taylor, and Co. The state schools of Massachusetts were different from state hospitals; the latter was for the mentally ill, while state schools were institutions for the mentally defective (the name is a misnomer, as they did not generally involve any form of education).
Throughout its first 40 years, Belchertown operated mostly without scrutiny from outside sources. It was later discovered that since its inception the residents—some of whom had lived on the wards their entire lives—were being forced to have homosexual intercourse with each other by the staff; author Benjamin Ricci referred to the conditions there as "horrific", "medieval", and "barbaric".
Changing attitudes towards mental retardation, the reason for this situation was partly due to the prevailing cultural perspective of what was often called "mental deficiency". Around the turn of the 20th century, many people with handicaps were simply kept at home when possible. This changed in the 1920s and 1930s because state governments and bureaucracies developed special divisions to manage these individuals—in Massachusetts and elsewhere, this was the role of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. In addition, expertise on "the infirm" became a specialty in the medical world, which in turn helped shape social policy. And while few parents would want to send their child to live in squalor and suffer abuse, many felt they had no other choice as there was simply nowhere else for a child with severe disabilities to go.
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