Faribault School for the Feeble-Minded

Postcards of the School for the Feeble-Minded painted an idyllic picture. This one depicts a blue sky with fluffy clouds over sprawling, manicured green lawns. The landscape is dotted with trees. In the foreground, there is a path with a circular intersection that leads to a castle-like central building flying the American flag.

On each side, the building is bookended by a short ward and a pavilion. The exterior walls are light-colored with many narrow windows. However, the surrounding landscape and the American flag make the space more reminiscent of a college campus than a fort.

Like a college campus, the School for the Feeble-Minded was founded for educational purposes. This “ experimental school ” opened in Faribault, Minnesota in 1879 under the direction of the Minnesota Institution for the Education of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind.

This was the first time that the state provided for the care and training of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Unlike the postcard illustration, life at the School wasn’t as idyllic.

Located at 600 SE Mott Avenue, the School was renamed many times over the years. It became known as the Minnesota Institute for Defectives in 1887, the School for the Feeble-Minded in 1895, the School for Feeble-Minded and Colony for Epileptics in 1906, and the Faribault State School and Hospital in 1955.

These names illustrate how attitudes toward disability changed over time. The name “School for the Feeble-Minded” is primarily used because it reveals the influence of eugenics, which is discussed throughout this case study.

Since the institution closed in 1998, most of the buildings are no longer standing or have been left to deteriorate. Despite the state of the physical remains, the site still holds many layers of disability history and can still serve as a powerful site of disability justice.

The School for the Feeble-Minded was founded during the Gilded Age. This period (1870s-1900) was characterized by rapid industrialization, global mass migration, and widening socioeconomic inequality.

Amidst all these changes, many wealthy, white Americans were drawn to Social Darwinism, which applied Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to societal problems, such as poverty.

Many white elites used Social Darwinism to claim racial, national, and class superiority. For instance, in 1864, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer was the first to apply “the survival of the fittest” to human society. Sir Francis Galton took these ideas one step further to inform the basis for eugenics.(1)

Eugenics was a popular form of pseudoscience. Eugenicists believed they could improve society by controlling who could have children. Positive eugenics strategies encouraged “fitter families” to reproduce, whereas negative eugenics included measures like forced sterilization to prevent people with “undesirable traits” from having children.(2)

Some eugenicists used their support for biological wholeness and an idealized standard of whiteness to justify the exclusion of people of color and people with disabilities. For instance, the outdated term “feeble-minded” was used to indicate deficiency, due to factors such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and disability.(3)

Eugenics also informed the approach to care and training at the School for the Feeble-Minded. This was largely due to the efforts of R. A. Mott and Arthur Curtis Rogers.

Mott was a prominent attorney who served on the Board of Directors of the Minnesota Institution for the Education of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind. Rogers served as the School’s superintendent between 1885 and 1917, and was well-respected in Minnesota.

In 1887, Mott drafted legislation to formally establish the “experimental school” as a state institution. He also explicitly aligned his goals for the School with efforts to “ protect the future of this republic from outside mental, moral, and physical rottenness .”

At the School, Rogers studied students and used  his research  to support eugenics policies in the state. He concluded that people with developmental disabilities had uncontrollable impulses and 'incurable' tendencies that could lead to immoral or destructive behavior.(4)

To prevent these traits from being passed on, he recommended medical intervention, including the  forced sterilization of students  (and later patients) at Faribault.

Ideas about whether students could be fixed or cured informed many of the activities at the School for the Feeble-Minded. For instance, one  superintendent’s report to the State Board of Control  from 1926 explained that training was intended to “make life more livable,” but would ultimately “not have made [the students] fundamentally different.”

This report reveals the distinction between the custodial “care and comfort” offered to students who could not “be improved” and the education and training offered to the "weak-minded.” Attendants and administrators also separated students so that those who remained “sluggish” would not have a corrupting influence on students who responded to “stimulation.”

The report also speaks to the  outdated medical model , which viewed disabled people as sick and in need of medical treatment.

Today, disabled people do not view their impairments as something to be fixed. Instead, their disabilities provide a point of view and experiences that are unique and beneficial.

Although there are still medical interventions associated with various disabilities, a social or human rights model focuses on what makes an environment disabling instead of how disabilities are embodied by people.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, many non-disabled parents tried to hide children with disabilities or treated them like social outcasts. There was also an assumption that “ nothing could be done for them .”

Because people with disabilities were considered unfixable, they were also considered “unfit” for non-disabled society and needed to be separated to isolated, rural areas away from densely populated metropolitan centers. Institutionalization also enabled attendants to prevent people with disabilities from reproducing by policing their behavior or forcibly sterilizing them.(5)

The School for the Feeble-Minded was the first state institution that provided a lifelong home for people with developmental disabilities who could not live independently or required assistance. The School’s founders hoped to create a safe community apart from a “ cold world too busy to be patient with [students’] particularities .”

This approach illustrates how disabilities can be socially constructed within a disabling environment. For instance, regarding the School as the only safe place for people with disabilities removed them from the bounds of “normalcy.”

In addition to custodial care, the School also provided  elementary education and occupational training . Much of this work was  divided by gender , with female students performing more domestic tasks like sewing, while male students did farmwork and other manual labor.

The School’s educational and training programs were both based on eugenicists’ beliefs about social control. These programs encouraged self-sufficiency, strengthened willpower, and moral uplift to help students who participated in non-disabled society to assimilate more easily. 

The emphasis on assimilation reveals how the School based students’ value on their productive capacity for labor. This perspective likely stemmed from eugenicists’ beliefs that people with developmental disabilities were not able to contribute to society intellectually.

Attendants and administrators structured school and workdays to keep students as engaged (and productive) as possible. In reports, the School claimed that keeping students busy helped attendants to supervise them and manage their needs. Although this approach was not intended to keep students “ at any one employment so long as to weary them ,” it was ultimately profitable for the School itself.

For instance,  Superintendent Rogers’s 1891 status report  indicates that students’ labor supported a prosperous brush industry, produced all of the School’s milk, and harvested 3,000 bushels of potatoes the previous year. Yet, only nine of the total 322 students received “small pay.”

Between the 1890s and 1920s, the School shifted its emphasis from “training” to custodial care. Although students’ labor was no longer exploited, they continued to suffer from  overcrowding  and the forced sterilizations that were used to address it.

The language used to describe students and their disabilities also reveals some of the intersections between disability and race. For instance, records and historical photographs from the School specifically refer to some students with developmental disabilities as “Mongolian” or “Mongoloid idiots.”

In the early 1900s, “Mongolian idiocy” and “Mongolism” were terms used to describe people with Down syndrome. During this period, white people often referred to people from East Asia as “Mongolian.”

“Mongoloid idiocy” was first coined by the British medical doctor John Langdon Down. In addition to promoting the segregation and training of people with developmental disabilities, Down also used his work to justify white racial supremacy.(6)

Terms like “Mongolism” suggested that East Asian ethnic groups departed from an idealized standard of whiteness in the same way that disability departed from eugenicists’ ideal of “biological wholeness.”

Although this term originated in Europe, its popularity in the United States was likely due to white fears about Asian immigration, job scarcity, and white racial purity.(7) These fears became the basis for restrictions on Asian immigration, among other factors that lawmakers believed would be “disabling” to white American society, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and disability.(8)

The term "Mongolian idiocy" is just one example of how race and disability are two marginalized identities that mutually inform one another. At the School for the Feeble-Minded, using the term “Mongolism” had real impacts beyond naming. Students who were labeled as “Mongolian idiots” were often treated in dehumanizing ways.

For instance, in a  1947 letter , Superintendent E.J. Engberg notes that on 2 or 3 occasions, medical staff “advised the mother not to become attached to the baby, but to have the child admitted...then cease giving the child attention.”

John Langdon Down encouraged this kind of separation and classification. He claimed that children with developmental disabilities would feel isolated among non-disabled people. Yet, it was Down’s recommendations that isolated people with disabilities.

Although the cause of developmental disabilities was unknown, Down also believed that people with “lower intelligence” could have a corrupting influence. This uncertainty heightened fears among parents and the public and only encouraged them to exclude and shun people with developmental disabilities.(9)

These actions offer another example of how disability and the stigma associated with it are socially constructed.

By the time the institution closed in 1998, it was called the Faribault State School and Hospital. Since then, people have graffitied over the remaining buildings and treat it like a haunted roadside attraction. This is partially due to the institution's cemetery, which contains hundreds of numbered graves for students, patients, and residents who died on the site. 

Since 1994, the  disability rights project Remembering with Dignity  has worked to research burials and install  gravestones with names  at state institution cemeteries across Minnesota. The group successfully lobbied the Minnesota legislature for a  formal apology  and to fund the new gravemarkers.(10)

Beyond physical markers, disability rights activists, former residents, and family members of the deceased have continued to memorialize people who died at the site by reimagining their life histories and creating their portraits.

These memorialization efforts—and the ways in which they brought people together—demonstrate how we can keep memory alive through art and through activism. The process of memorializing and remembering can be especially meaningful at  sites of conscience  and at places that are not eligible for formal historic designation.

While the physical cemetery memorial acknowledges the unmarked burials, process-based memorial efforts, such as “See Their Faces,” can address trauma that did not leave a mark on the landscape, such as the donation of unclaimed bodies to medical schools, forced medical procedures, neglect and overcrowding, and other abuse.

Future memorial efforts should return to the School’s original intent to raise questions about what safety, community, and care mean within the context of contemporary issues. These issues may include access to healthcare, rates of mental illness among unhoused people, and the incarceration of neurodiverse people.

(1) Sasha Warren, “ Eugenics in Minnesota ,” MNopedia, last modified April 13, 2020.

(2) Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Coping with a ‘Public Menace’: Eugenic Sterilization in Minnesota,” Minnesota History 59, no. 6 (Summer 2005): 237-248.

(3) Nirmala Erevelles, “Race,” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 146.

(4) Warren, “ Eugenics in Minnesota .”

(5) Ladd-Taylor, “Coping with a Public Menace,” 239; Warren, “ Eugenics in Minnesota .”

(6) Stacy Clifford Simplican, “Manufacturing Anxiety: The Medicalization of Mental Defect,” The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 54.

(7)  Erika Lee, “Exclusion Acts: Race, Class, Gender, and Citizenship in the Enforcement of the Exclusion Laws,” At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill; London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), Ebook.

(8) Erevelles, “Race,” 147.

(9) Simplican, “Manufacturing Anxiety,” 56-57.

(10) Sasha Warren, “ Remembering With Dignity ,” MNopedia, last modified July 24, 2020.