The Ladd School
Coordinates: 41°33′14″N 71°32′34″W / 41.5539°N 71.5428°W The Ladd School in Exeter, Rhode Island operated from 1908 to 1993 as a state institution to serve the needs of mentally retarded / developmentally delayed persons. It was closed largely due to the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1980s.
Founded in 1908, the Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded began as a small farm colony in rural Exeter, Rhode Island. It was a new kind of school, established on the basis of the experimental Templeton Colony annex of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded - the oldest public institution of its kind in the nation. While the formal purpose of the Templeton Colony and its Rhode Island counterpart was to train young people with disabilities in the application of farm work and mechanical trades, the institutions' forefather, Dr. Walter Fernald, was a famous eugenicist whose doctrine was to remove the feeble-minded from society in an effort to cleanse the nation’s population of inferior and "defective" genes. This ideology would come to define the purpose of the school.
Dr. Fernald’s protégé and chief administrator of the Templeton Colony, Dr. Joseph Ladd, was the school’s first superintendent. An accomplished physician and classically educated pedagogue, his administration of the institution during its early development was considered by many to be a noteworthy contributor to the state’s public welfare. However, as the years wore on, his reputation for mistreatment of the students grew. In 1916 he changed the name of the institution to Exeter School in order to abate public disapproval of the term ‘feeble-minded,’ and by the 1920s, the institution’s entire character and purpose had become altogether something different.
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