Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society
This is a story about a painful chapter in Minnesota history. It is also a family tale, that connects people who have a connection to that time and forever to each other.
“Idiots” lived there. That was what doctors and politicians called the residents of Faribault State Hospital in southern Minnesota. In 1879 the Legislature established The Experimental School for Imbeciles. I want to find it, the spot where “unimprovable” people lived and often died. My 29-year-old son, Porter, has developmental delays, seizures, and autism. In another era, he may have been there. There is another reason I want to find and understand this place: Faribault Hospital was the center of the Minnesota eugenics movement from 1910 to 1961. This is where physicians forcibly sterilized people for decades.
It’s not obvious how to find the old institution. I called the Faribault town hall last fall, and the woman who answered said, “The hospital no longer exists.” Janet was friendly and firm. She was also very Minnesotan: Her message was neutral, though clearly a coded signal. I know from online forums that she is right, but not completely: the ruins remain.
After internet scrolling, I find a community of paranormal explorers. They discuss the institution’s old buildings. I decided to find the address by posting a message on the Haunted Hovel site. A day later, the left-right-left directions were sent by someone with the screen name of CallMeGoofy. I drove the five miles from my farm and was in the middle of a field. Anywhere Minnesota.
The overgrown trails seemed to lead nowhere. The ground was chunky and thick. The left-right-left was transposed, understandable since Goofy acknowledged he was “somewhat high” when making the trek. I continued forward, wild blackberries on one side and a thigh-high metal gate on the other. Finally, a hulk of cement became visible in the distance, looming like a soviet-era housing project. It was a square, two-story building, and the door was gone. Graffiti was everywhere.
“Drugs not Hugs”” was spray-painted in black letters. Next to that, Homer Simpson sat on a fat red heart. He looked tired. Beer cans were strewn on a mattress in the windowless back room. The metal skeleton of an industrial bed tilted next to a rusted wheelchair.
The smell of mold. That’s what I noticed, and I instinctively covered my nose. A small sign outside the second building read, “Faribault State Hospital.” I stepped further and saw the place where the underground tunnel began. Haunted Hovel members said it was a paranormal jackpot. They wrote that you could hear people crying if you stood still enough.
As I looked at the hospital’s crumbly walls, I remembered the pictures of its heyday: Brick structures arranged around a courtyard like a liberal-arts college campus. Faribault had a garden and barn to supply food.
Pictures of the dorms showed beds lined up in giant rooms: row after row-identical hospital frames. They had industrial blankets and a chair with restraints where patients were punished. Many lived much of their lives tied to those chairs.
From 1879 to 1998, the hospital had a roulette of names as the public gentrified their labels for people nobody wanted. The School for Imbeciles changed to Minnesota’s Institute for Defectives and, later still, the School for the Feeble-Minded. Leading physicians worked at Faribault and led the charge to stamp out societal “idiocy.” Forced sterilizations were done to prevent it from being passed generationally.
I first learned about Faribault Hospital when Porter’s other mother, Ramona, told me about it. Ramona is Porter’s longterm caregiver. He lives in her private group home with one other young man. Porter calls us both Mommy, his word for women who love him.
Recently, Ramona shared what happened to her Native American grandmother.
“She was pregnant with my father when she was 15, so they institutionalized her.” Ramona is factual and direct. She has straight brown hair, brown eyes, and a tattoo of a heart with wings in memory of her orphaned father.
Ramona shows me a picture of the hospital records from 1935. She received a copy of these from the Minnesota Historical Society. Her grandmother is listed in the registry as a “Dirty little red girl” who had her child taken and was institutionalized for “disgusting, immoral behavior.” While there, she was forcibly sterilized. “She lost her uterus and her son,” Ramona tells me.
Ramona’s grandmother’s story was not anomalous.
From 1925 to 1975, forced sterilization was legal in Minnesota. In this time thousands of patients, overwhelmingly women, had the procedure without consent. Most were singled out when they used welfare services or committed juvenile offenses. Institutionalization was incongruously interwoven in Minnesota’s progressive family-support programs. Both were seen as helping the downtrodden. The national zeitgeist also played a role as famous eugenicists, many employed at Faribault State Hospital, published in leading medical journals. They were specific in their goal: To improve society by eradicating the “menace of the feeble-minded.” The Eugenicist movement finally lost steam when it was coopted by Hitler.
As the number of female admissions increased at Faribault in the 1930s, there was a problem. Many of the patients turned out to be intelligent. During this time, they often escaped. The hospital leadership blamed it on the influx of brighter deviants. In one report, Faribault’s census noted 30% “idiots,” 40% “imbeciles” and 30% higher functioning “morons.” Apparently, the morons outwitted the doctors and kept running off.
As a psychologist, I understand the human tendency to judge things out of context. It’s even more personal than that: the state’s forced sterilization criteria included those with alcoholism, mental illness, and disability. That sounds like my family. Like other institutions, there is also the reckoning of many residents’ fates. In 1997, the Remembering with Dignity project began to identify hospital patients buried in unmarked graves. The group estimated they would find 10,000 people, though the actual number is closer to 15,000. Numbered stone markers were all that remained for thousands of former patients. Their causes of death are equally murky.
I think of Ramona’s grandmother and how our families intertwine. I wonder how my life would be different if her grandmother was sterilized sooner so she never had a child and Ramona and I never met. Instead, their family history drove Ramona to choose not to have her own children and instead to devote her life to caring for people with disabilities. She tells me she knew this destiny when she was a child.
Author Sarah Bridges is a psychologist and organizational consultant who works with leaders in national organizations and non-profits. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
