West Building
What was the role of the West Building in the Fernald school? How did it fit into the overall mission of the school?
According to our sources, the West Building, the oldest educational building on the campus, was approved for construction in 1889, costing, in total, $67,000. Discussions of its construction appear in trustee reports from 1888. The Building, when it was opened in 1890 as “The Asylum”, was used for the custodial purpose of housing 60 children and adult women, that number rose to 119 later that year.
However, The Asylum did not stay as solely a custodial building. A few years later, in 1894, there are records of Sunday services being held in The Asylum. This is presumably because of overpopulation occurring in the school, which led to there being overflow in the chapel of the Fernald Campus. As well, multiple new additions were added to the building throughout the years, the first of which was a shack adjacent to it used for the storage of coal.
The building was maintained by the children of the Fernald school. There are records from 1895 describing how 6 boys who did not hold residence in the building itself painted the interior walls of The Asylum.
In 1897, trustee reports say that The Asylum’s purpose had broadened to become more of a “special care” custodial building, as well as something of a miscellaneous use building. The physically handicapped were kept in The Asylum, as well as more records of food being stored in sections of the building as population continued to grow on the campus. A new dining room was also added to The Asylum, now referred to as the “West Building”.
Unfortunately, after these dates, the history of the West Building becomes sparse in documentation. We know through our tours of the campus, that at some point during the early 1900’s the building was completely repurposed. It became an educational place, rather than the custodial ward it had been for so long. The building was used for teaching some of the more seriously handicapped children basic skills such as counting and spelling. However, towards the very end of the building’s use, which ended in the early/mid 1970’s, the place had been turned back into a housing for young women and “severely disabled” children.
The West Building came to a close in the early to mid 1970’s due to a report from a nurse in 1970 describing the West Building’s conditions as "unlivable" due to freezing temperatures during the unheated nights.
There has been a pattern throughout the history of the West Building. In many of the sources we found, which consists mostly of actual trustee reports, the authors of the reports (superintendent Walter Fernald, or the assistant S.I.) were always very impartial towards the inhabitants of the West Building. Describing them in quantitative terms rather than qualitative. This pattern is awfully appropriate for the time in which the sources appear because handicapped people were viewed as lesser beings who could “contaminate” the genetics of humanity were they to be allowed to “breed”. This dehumanization of the people inside the West Building is quite disturbing and a clear warning sign, or would have been one were it not for the fact that most of these reports were kept out of the public eye.
Bibliography
Ben-Ishmael Tribe, this page was last modified on 9 October 2016, at 21:34. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ishmael_Tribe.
Connecticut. https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/CT/CT.html
Manson, Doris: Dorothy Bourdon: Resident of Fernald since 1947, March 1994, page 35 http://pages.citebite.com/u5i5s6i5h8dka.
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine: An Alliance of the Boston Medical Library and Harvard
Medical School, Eugenics Legislation, Copyright 2015 The President and Trustees of Harvard University, powered by Omeka. https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/exhibits/show/galtonschildren/eugenics-legislation.
Laguarda, Ignacio: State urges city to avoid school at Fernald. Posted Oct 25, 2016 at 5:01 PM
Updated Oct 26, 2016 at 9:17 AM.
http://waltham.wickedlocal.com/news/20161025/state-urges-city-to-avoid-school-at-fernald.
Science: 1890s-1930s: Eugenics and Physical Anthropology. 2007 American Anthropological Association. http://www.understandingrace.org/history/science/eugenics_physical.html.
