Copyright Hartford Courant
English professor Brenda Brueggemann had driven by the memorial stone, the grassy grove and the architectural shells of the shuttered institution every day for years on her way to teach at the University of Connecticut. The campus of the former Mansfield Training School, a state institution that, until the early 1990s, had housed people with intellectual disabilities, was now nothing more than a labyrinth of empty buildings along a stretch of Route 44, overgrown with ivy and left to rot on the inside. Then in 2022, a student of Brueggemann’s, who was researching how individuals with disabilities were treated in university settings, started digging through UConn’s archives. The work would lead to what Brueggemann called a “dark realization” about the history that was hiding in plain sight. And it launched a much larger project. For the past three years, Brueggemann and her students have been piecing together the history of the Mansfield Training School, now owned by the university and referred to as the “Depot Campus.” They’ve gone through archives, given presentations, made visits to the site and created a website outlining the history of the training school and what they’ve found in its archives. And they’ve grappled with its controversial legacy — one that aligns with the fraught history of institutions for disabled people across the U.S. Brueggemann has also taken on the task of piecing together an oral history of the Mansfield Training School. She’s spoken with family members of former residents and, through a Facebook group, she’s interviewed people who used to work there. Now she’s looking for a way to formally preserve it all. “The more I found, the more I knew that we needed a memorial of some kind,” Brueggemann said. The student who first called Brueggemann’s attention to the vacant campus was Jess Gallagher. Then an undergraduate student in English literature, Gallagher was working on an honors thesis and had been reading about the way people with disabilities were treated in university settings. They began wondering what that history was at UConn. Over the course of roughly 400 hours going through documents in the archives, the professor and her students unearthed a story of an institution that reflected the shifts and changes in contemporary opinions about the proper setting and treatment for people with intellectual disabilities. The site was a hospital in the mid-1800s and a labor farm in the 1920s. By the 1960s, it was the site of psychological experimentation. In subsequent decades, treatment for the resident population transformed from restraint, seclusion and the use of heavy sedatives to more modern care — such as homier living quarters and more targeted pharmaceuticals. Over the years, its barracks-style residences, cut off from society at large, were replaced with smaller dormitories and more integrated living — group homes — in the surrounding community. Ultimately, in 1993, shifting public opinion and legal battles put an end to the institution all together. But Gallagher said the school’s archival records only revealed so much. The documents they’d combed through often referred to Mansfield Training School residents simply as “numbers,” she said. The stories that truly brought life and color to the school’s history were those Gallagher found outside the archives — like one memorable 2001 profile they’d read in The Hartford Courant, which changed the way they thought about the research project. Jimmy Lundquist, the subject of the profile, lived at Mansfield Training School for nearly two decades and tried to escape several times. He’d witnessed residents being placed in straightjackets and isolation rooms, and in the article he recounted beatings and strip searches. Eventually, after leaving the school and living in multiple group homes, he found work and became a well-known resident in his West Hartford neighborhood. Stories like Lundquist’s — along with the oral histories Brueggemann has compiled — lend a human face to the institutional history. Gallagher said they believe that’s worth preserving. “ During the time period of institutionalization, and even today, people have the stereotype that people with disabilities can’t live fulfilling lives or independent lives. So seeing [Lundquist] flourish and subvert that narrative, I think, was the best thing to see,” they said. From the archives In a timeline on the memorial website, Brueggemann and her students lay out much of the institution’s first 175 years. It was established in 1850 by a doctor named Henry Knight, who ran it by himself for its first six years. The state of Connecticut then agreed to provide funding to the institution, which was called “Knight Hospital” and described by author and scholar James W. Trent Jr. as a place for “feeble-minded patients.” It would become the Mansfield Training School and Hospital in 1917. During the flu epidemic of 1918-19, an overwhelming number of residents got sick, and 30 died. By 1940, the Mansfield Training School had grown to nearly 1,200 residents. They were trained to cook, sew, clean and farm — but they weren’t paid for their labor. Female residents made clothes and baskets, which were sold to support the institution. Archival records document poor conditions and overcrowding. The archives also revealed abuse, including the frequent use of restraints and isolation. Anyone who tried to run away was punished. In one month in 1957, 39 residents spent more than half of each day in restraints. In 1972, an article in the Mansfield Chronicle revealed that employees at the training school routinely abused and beat residents. And in 1977, the Connecticut Department of Labor logged 41 pages of health violations at the facilities. UConn, which acquired the campus in 1969, became involved with the school years earlier, in 1963. That year, the state passed a law allocating funds for research centers, community mental health centers and teacher training for children with disabilities. Part of that funding went to UConn to build clinical facilities. University students began visiting the training school to conduct clinical work there, and professors at UConn received grants to conduct experiments on residents of the training school. “It seems that the … residents at MTS were often used for the benefit of the institutions they inhabited,” the website timeline reads. Former workers at the school have nuanced memories of the place. John Ryan, an employee from 1967-1975, remembers both happy and dark moments. Ryan worked as an aide with residents who were moderately disabled and with the blind. He said he helped teach them to tie their shoes and dress themselves, and he enjoyed the work. There were trips to the circus and to a baseball game at Fenway Park. He remembers making a float for Memorial Day and parading with students down the campus’ main road. But Ryan said the situation was different for staff who worked in a separate building with severely disabled residents. Workers regularly called out sick, he said, and they often smelled of urine. “They had a huge turnover in those buildings,” Ryan said. Some of the school’s more high-functioning residents, known as the “working boys,” would help out with the more severely disabled residents, changing their clothes and cleaning up. There was a larger societal problem, too, Ryan said — a stigma. He recalled that some parents rarely visited or took their children out for the day. “Back in the ’60s and ’70s, mental retardation was a dark subject,” he said. “They didn’t know as much about it.” Many families avoided talking about their disabled children. But over the years, some of those same relatives have gotten curious about the place their loved ones spent much of their lives. Gretchen Law remembers going to visit her older sister, Missy, when she lived at the Mansfield Training School. On Sundays after church, the family would drive over from their home in Granby. Law said she remembers the “institutional hospital smell” of the buildings “and the color on the wall. It was kind of that sort of greenish blue institutional color.” Missy, who was nonverbal and needed help feeding herself, was sent to live at the training school in the early 1960s, when she was 8 or 9. “ I can’t speak for my mom and my dad, but it was a decision that they made based on what was done with children like this during that time,” Law said. In their father’s journals, which Law discovered years later, he wrote that he believed it had been a “wise” decision and he was grateful to the staff for taking care of Missy. But Law said that their mother never received any support or therapy to help her through the experience and that, even today, the knowledge of having placed her daughter at the Mansfield Training School “haunts her.” When Law was 7, her parents separated. Not long after, Missy, then 15, died from a congenital heart defect. Law said that she and her family rarely talked about Missy after that. About 15 years ago, Law was working as a teacher in Deerfield, Mass., when she started to wonder whether her sister’s life might have been different if she’d had the kind of support now available to students with special needs. “ In my school, we had a program where kids were nonverbal, they were in feeding tubes, they were in wheelchairs. So I would look at these kids and just say, ‘That was my sister,’” she said. Law said sharing the stories of people who spent time at Mansfield Training School could help family members — like herself and others like her — to find peace. “We should be telling these stories,” she said. “It affects someone, it came from someone’s life experience, so this is part of our culture. Let’s not ignore it.” The end of an institution By 1970, the Mansfield Training School’s days were numbered. Public opinion of residential institutions for the disabled was shifting. Lawsuits were being filed across the country. In Connecticut, an investigation by the American Association of Mental Deficiency had determined that Mansfield was overcrowded and understaffed and that residents had no privacy. In response to the sea change in public opinion, school leaders worked to revamp the facilities. “Cottages” were constructed to replace the large barracks-like dormitories. The school also established rules for the use of restraints and added reporting requirements and training for staff. Robert Tyrka, who worked at Mansfield Training School from 1978 to 1988, witnessed the change. When he first started working there — helping the residents shower, eat and get ready for activities — he said there might have been two staff members for every 20 residents. But as time went on, that ratio improved, he said. Negotiations with the union led to significant improvements in salaries and benefits, and over time people began thinking of the jobs less as a temporary placement and more as a career. And thanks to pharmaceutical improvements, doctors began to prescribe more targeted treatments rather than the heavy-duty drugs they relied on in the 1970s. But the improvements at the school didn’t save it. In 1978, a group of parents filed a lawsuit against what was then known as the Connecticut Department of Mental Retardation, in part to stop a plan that would have allowed the Department of Correction to use certain buildings on the Mansfield grounds to house prisoners. A consent decree that emerged from the lawsuit provided the plaintiffs with case managers tasked with finding them new homes within their communities. The decree eventually led to the closing of the Mansfield Training School. The remaining residents were transferred into group homes, and the land and buildings were abandoned to decay, quietly receding from sight and from memory. Tyrka, who went on to work at Southbury Training School and later at group homes, said he believes the group homes were mostly an improvement over institutional settings. But he said what he perceived as near-constant news coverage of abuses at Mansfield was unfair. He said those reports didn’t portray any of the positive things that happened there until it became clear the facility was going to close. He’d like to see the full story told. “If it can be done in an even-handed, in a balanced way, then I think it would be worthwhile to explore the good, the bad, the ugly — all of it from Mansfield insofar as that can be encapsulated,” he said. In the years that have passed since the closing, the University of Connecticut has tried to find a use for the land. The school has sold part of the property to the state of Connecticut to be used for the construction of a new Windham Technical High School. Other deals to sell portions of the land have fallen through. Brueggemann and her students are curious about the possibility that human remains might be buried at the site. Other states, including Kentucky, California and Minnesota, have made such discoveries. Last year, Brueggemann and several students sent an email to UConn President Radenka Maric and associate vice president in charge of University Planning, Design, and Construction Laura Cruickshank inquiring about conducting a survey using ground penetrating radar, a technology that can show whether human remains lie under the ground. UConn officials responded that there were no records that would indicate a burial ground existed on the property and that they did not plan to do a survey without further evidence. Ashten Vassar-Cain, a former student of Brueggemann’s, said he’s planning to seek funding from the Connecticut State Historical Preservation Office to do a radar sweep of the area. But he said UConn would have to approve it. “Even though Mansfield Training School has been closed for over 30 years, even though the buildings are standing near rotting, and nothing has been ‘done’ with the land, the stories are still there,” Vassar-Cain said. Restoring without ‘sanitizing’ What happened years ago at the Mansfield Training School remains a question in the minds of relatives — one that may never be fully answered. That was the case for Jan Doyle, whose older sister Evvie was a resident of the training school for four decades. Jan said her sister was born prematurely and suffered brain damage. After their parents placed Evvie in Mansfield, in 1953, they never spoke about her. “ Personally, I was very angry at my parents for years for doing that,” Jan said. “But I understand now through my own research, they were just doing what the experts told them was the best for their child.” By the time Jan officially met her sister, they were both in their 40s. Evvie had been placed in a state-run group home after Mansfield closed, and Jan was asked to be her sister’s medical proxy. Jan said she felt compelled to step forward. On the first day they met, Jan threw Evvie a birthday party. They began spending more time together, and Jan regularly took Evvie and her boyfriend — a fellow resident at the group home — out to lunch. She and Evvie liked to sing along to songs on the radio together. But when Jan asked Evvie if she remembered being at Mansfield Training School, she clammed up. “ She wouldn’t talk to me anymore for the rest of the day, and she has never been like that,” Jan said. “The experience had to be so horrible that when she was in her 70s, she still couldn’t talk about it.” Evvie died of cancer in 2022. Since then, Jan Doyle has been working on projects that would honor her sister’s memory, including a fictional memoir and a series of quilts. She said she wants to educate family members about the value of being involved in the lives of people with special needs. Doyle said she’d like to see a few of the buildings at the training school be restored to the way they used to be — without it being “sanitized” — as a way to memorialize the history of the site. It could be part museum and part gathering place for families to “learn, share and support each other in a safe place,” she said. “It could be a resource and a hub for the state and the country to share this information — where we were, which was horrible … and where we are now.” Emilia Otte is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2025 © The Connecticut Mirror.
