Beaver Brook Concrete Blocks as gravestones Stone blocks mark the graves P or C
Parking
We parked at Rock Meadow Conservation in Belmont to walk around 15 minutes to Metfern Cemetary. This is a place that feels like it’s not meant to be found. Advance warning this is a grim and difficult history lesson.
Hike
The mostly flat walk took 50 minutes for a 2 miles roundtrip. Starting at the wooden steps from the parking lot to the kids’ playground, over the new wooden bridge across Beaver Brook into the woods. It’s a narrow winding path 15 minutes to the dirt road. We turned right and MetFern Cemetary was on the left.
The Cemetary is an institutional burial ground. 296 inmates buried between 1947-79 came from the Metropolitan State Hospital a nearby psychiatric asylum, and Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center, a state school for the mentally and intellectually disabled founded in 1927.
Walter E. Fernald was on the board of the Eugenics Society and had initially advocated the forced sterilization of people with “developmental disabilities”. He later downgraded this idea to promote strictly enforced segregation into state-run institutions like the school he ran. Poor often immigrant children and young adults spent a lifetime in places like the Fernald across America. They were ill-educated and forced to labor in the surrounding fields, physically abused, and even murdered while in state care.
In 2018, Gann Academy teacher Alex Green led his class in a project to trace the names of those who are buried in the MetFern Cemetery.
Other Recommendations
Read about this fascinating community-focused history project to give dignity to the victims of institutional and societal failure. MetFern Cemetary Project.
