The Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts, is now being transformed into a park that will include an 18-hole mini golf course. But the land carries a history that has been difficult to bury: In the 1940s and 1950s, boys living there were fed radioactive iron and calcium in their breakfast cereal as part of nutrition studies funded by the Quaker Oats Company and the Atomic Energy Commission, without their families being fully informed. The story traces back to 1846, when the Massachusetts legislature appointed commissioners to investigate the condition of people the law then called “idiots of the Commonwealth.
” Samuel Gridley Howe, who ran the Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston, led the effort. His commission surveyed the state and reported findings on more than 570 people living in poorhouses and back rooms. In the spring of 1848, the legislature approved $2,500 a year for three years to teach ten children selected by the governor. The experimental school opened at Perkins that autumn.
Its first annual report described pupils who had never been taught before. Some could not walk or control their own muscles. In 1850, the program was incorporated as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth. Under Howe, students learned reading, counting, shoe repair, broom making, weaving, and other trades alongside music and athletics.
The institution moved in 1887, when the legislature appropriated $25,000 to buy farmland in Waltham. The property included an 18-acre estate and a cow barn large enough for 50 cattle. The new superintendent was Dr. Walter E.
Fernald, a Maine-born physician who took charge in 1887 and held the position until his death. In a 1912 speech to the Massachusetts Medical Society, he described people with intellectual disabilities as a “parasitic predatory class” and argued that the condition was “incurable and permanent. ” He called for the “elimination of feeble-mindedness” through what he considered humane means, including strictly enforced segregation in state institutions. Fernald’s new campus was designed by architect William G.
Preston on a cottage plan, with patient rooms facing south toward the sun. Construction began in 1888, and the first 61 students were admitted on March 6, 1890. According to preservation records, the fieldstone foundations of the oldest buildings were laid by the patients themselves. The campus grew over the decades, eventually covering roughly 200 acres with dozens of buildings.
At its peak in the 1960s, Fernald held about 2,600 residents, a fivefold increase from 1911. The growth brought crowding. Boys’ dormitories held about 36 children per room with one attendant on duty. Former resident Fred Boyce later described how attendants made boys sit on wooden benches for hours with their arms folded, and that unfolding your arms meant punishment.
The institution’s reputation as a progressive school also eroded. Testing sorted children into categories such as “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron. ” Some residents were not disabled at all. In 1994, the state’s own commissioner acknowledged that not everyone admitted to Fernald had been there for mental retardation.
The Boston Globe estimated that upwards of half of those tested had intelligence in the normal range. Superintendents reportedly relied on residents who could have returned home to perform unpaid labor, maintaining the institution and saving taxpayer money. The experiments began in December 1945, when MIT nutrition professor Robert S. Harris wrote to the superintendent proposing research on the boys.
Harris assured him there was “absolutely no ground for caution about the radioactive quantities involved. ” The research question was about breakfast cereal. Nutritionists knew that compounds called phytates in grain could block iron absorption, and rolled oats contained them. The goal was to determine whether oatmeal or Cream of Wheat was better nutritionally.
In 1946, boys were served seven special breakfasts in which radioactive iron was stirred into the milk poured over their cereal. The data went into MIT doctoral thesis work supported by Quaker Oats. Between 1950 and 1953, a second series of experiments tested radioactive calcium, involving dozens of boys who ate special breakfasts or received injections. Researchers came from MIT, Harvard Medical School, and Fernald’s own staff.
The Atomic Energy Commission helped fund the work. The school called participating boys the “science club. ” In November 1949, the superintendent sent parents a form letter about a “special diet rich in cereals, iron, and vitamins. ” It did not mention radiation or risk.
A 1953 permission letter told parents their sons had “volunteered” because science club boys received privileges like a quart of milk a day, baseball games, trips to the beach, and dinners outside the school. It said nothing about radiation. Some boys still refused to participate. Harris wrote that three objectors could be induced to change their minds “by leaning on the science club angle.
” The state’s later task force expressed serious concern about a 1957 study of thyroid function in Down syndrome patients that used radioactive iodine on Fernald residents. When the story broke publicly in late 1993, the Boston Globe reported that club members received radiation equivalent to at least 50 chest X-rays. The state’s own experts later calculated the actual doses were far lower, ranging from 4 to 15 millirem in the calcium study, compared with about 300 millirem per year from natural background radiation in Boston. The federal advisory committee concluded the doses were low and that it was “extremely unlikely” any child had been harmed.
But the committee’s finding measured only the dose, not the consent. The boys had names. Fred Boyce was taken from his mother as an infant, spent years in foster homes, and scored 62 on an intelligence test. He joined the science club in 1949 for the perks, which included Red Sox tickets and Hopalong Cassidy mugs.
Nobody told him what was in the milk. He was paroled in 1961, taught himself to read as an adult, and later read Stephen Hawking. When he heard on his car radio that children at Fernald had been fed radioactive cereal, he shouted that it was him. He became the boys’ spokesman.
In testimony printed in the federal committee’s final report, he said the researchers had “bribed children who had so little they would do almost anything for attention,” and called treating them as no better than laboratory mice “unforgivable. ”
The federal advisory committee counted 74 boys in the two nutrition studies. A plaintiff’s lawyer said at least 90. The lawsuit said more than 100.
The MIT student newspaper reported 125. A terminally ill 10-year-old boy with a degenerative disease was given about 80 microcuries of radioactive calcium, roughly 94 times the amount in a single science club breakfast. He died before the study could be completed. The state task force report does not give his name, who approved the dose, or whether anyone asked.
Former residents sued MIT and Quaker Oats in a class action. The case settled for $1. 85 million, paid mostly by MIT and to a lesser degree by Quaker. MIT denied wrongdoing and said it settled to avoid litigation costs.
Divided among the class, the money came to between $50,000 and $65,000 per person, about $5,000 to $6,500 per year of childhood. The legal fight over Fernald itself began in 1972, when a class action was filed over conditions at the Belchertown State School. Similar suits followed for Fernald and other state institutions. Federal Judge Joseph Tauro inspected the schools personally and called conditions at each of them “deplorable and intolerable.
” For two decades, he held the Commonwealth to account. By 1979, the population had fallen to 1,161. In 1993, the court signed a disengagement order closing its oversight. In 2003, Governor Mitt Romney announced Fernald would close and its land would be sold by 2007.
Families and unions fought back. Judge Tauro ruled that the wishes of all 185 remaining residents had to be considered before any closure, but the state appealed. In October 2008, a three-judge panel ruled that Tauro had never had jurisdiction to reopen the case. The last resident left in November 2014, eleven years after the closure was announced.
After the last resident left, the campus became a target for trespassers and vandals. By the summer of 2022, roughly 25 buildings had been torn down. In January 2024, the Boston Globe published photographs showing patient and employee files spilling out of a waste bin in a building that had once been used for isolation, along with a sheet of paper in the dirt outside North Hall headed “psychotropic medical treatment plan” dated 1995. The Disability Law Center filed a complaint, and the federal Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation.
The state hired a professional company to remove the records. The campus has been on the National Register of Historic Places since January 21, 1994. The city of Waltham bought the land in 2014 and has approved plans to turn much of it into recreation space, including a memorial, a disability-accessible play area, a spray park, and an electric train. Construction began in early 2024, and the city’s recreation director has said the park will be the largest disability-accessible park in New England.
Some residents have objected, saying the history of the institution should not become an entertainment center. Others point out that Fernald changed after the court intervened and that the new amenities will be fully accessible. The legacy runs deeper than one campus. In 2025, a special commission created by the Massachusetts legislature found more than 14,000 names of people with disabilities buried in institutional graves whose records were still being withheld by the state.
In November 2025, a new law made institutional records public after 75 years. At a cemetery between Fernald and the old Metropolitan State Hospital, concrete blocks half sunk into the earth mark the graves. Most carry no name, just a letter and a number: C for Catholic, P for Protestant. The counts of how many people lie there vary from 296 to about 367.
One of them is John Scott, who died at Fernald at 17; his family spent 50 years not knowing where he lay. The blocks were set down to outlast the people who set them, and they have.