The Girls and Boys of Belchertown: A Social History of the Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded

3. The Officer and the Dentist

[ 23 ] chapter 3 The Officer and the Dentist z The Belchertown State School was designed according to the “cottage plan”—the dominant structural and operational model of the day for such facilities.1 Earlier institutions had utilized a single large, centralized structure for housing residents and staff and doing training. In the cottage plan, prevalent since the late nineteenth century, numerous smaller buildings (dormitories, employee cottages, schoolhouse, kitchen, hospital , industrial building, farm, and so forth) were neatly arranged in a campuslike setting of trees and gardens. The plan facilitated differentiation of the resident population by gender, level of ability, and medical condition . So-called higher functioning residents could be segregated from, and employed in the care of, lower functioning ones. The most profoundly disabled could be treated as permanently sick and cared for in the hospital or infirmary. The productive work of the institution (such as farming, sewing , and laundering) could be separated from formal academic or vocational training and performed in special facilities geared to such purposes. The cottage plan required a lot of land, and the tract assembled for the Belchertown State School was therefore large—800 acres according to the original deeds of sale, somewhat less, 622 acres, when finally reckoned. Further purchases were made over the years, bringing the total acreage to 843 in 1940.2 The original design called for forty-two buildings housing 1,800 residents and 400 employees, including seventeen dormitories, eleven employee cottages, an assembly hall, two large industrial buildings, two gymnasiums, a schoolhouse, a hospital, an administration building, and a power station.3 When the school opened in 1922, however, only a third of this planned construction had begun and very little was finished. [ 24 ] chapter 3 A core campus was completed in 1924, consisting of six dormitories (two for males, four for females), four employee cottages, a laundry (which doubled as classrooms and assembly hall), a storehouse (with temporary office space and a commissary where all meals were prepared), and the power station. Most of the other planned buildings were completed between 1925 and 1932. Although there would be additional construction later in the school’s history (as well as demolition), the physical facility that existed in 1932, a decade after the school opened, was largely the same as when it closed sixty years later. The completed main campus included eleven dormitories: for males, Buildings K (145 beds), L (105 beds), M (112 beds), and G (160 beds); for females, Buildings A (145 beds), B (105 beds), C (70 beds), D (105 beds), E (110 beds), and F (110 beds). Buildings K and L were completed in 1922, A through D in 1923–24, M in 1927, E in 1929, F in 1931, and G in 1960. The school added an eleventh dormitory—an infirmary—in 1952 to house 224 of its most physically disabled residents. Two nurseries (male and female) were built between 1930 and 1932 to accommodate children six years of age or younger. Each had 50 beds. A third nursery, called the Tadgell Nursery, was added in 1960. Nine employee cottages were built between 1922 and 1932; they were described as “attractive and homelike with . . . stucco walls and green trimmings.”4 Each accommodated at least twenty employees. In addition, the school built private housing for several of its resident officers. The superintendent’s house, a two-story affair completed in 1925, sat high on a hill at the southeast corner of the property. It boasted lovely views, gardens , and a private tennis court. A large storehouse, alongside the railroad spur on the extreme northwest corner of the property, was the first building at the state school (other than the farmhouse used by the farm colony before the school opened). Intended as storage space, it also housed the school’s administrative offices and kitchen for several years. A permanent administration building , to the left just inside the main gate, was built in 1927 and substantially enlarged in 1968. Several other nonresidential buildings filled out the campus. A sixtybed hospital was opened in 1931. It included an operating room, X-ray department, dental department, and laboratory. The laundry building, completed in 1923, was built large in anticipation of a school population exceeding 2,000 residents and 300 staff. Because the space exceeded the Plan of the Belchertown State School campus. —blackmer maps [ 26 ] chapter 3 school’s initial laundry...