The Fernald Center, originally called the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children,[4][5] was founded in Boston by reformer Samuel Gridley Howe in 1848 with a $2,500 appropriation from the Massachusetts State Legislature.

Under its third superintendent, Walter E. Fernald (1859–1924), the school was viewed as a model educational facility in the field of mental retardation and doctors and politicians from across the country and the world would travel to Waltham to study the methods employed at the center.

[6] It wasn’t until the end of his life that he had a reversal of many of these ideas, fighting against the segregation of most mentally disabled children, rejecting IQ tests, and supporting community education and out-patient clinics.

[10] The Fernald School was the site of the 1946–53 joint experiments by Harvard University and MIT that exposed young male children to tracer doses of radioactive isotopes.

This situation changed in the 1970s, when a class action suit, Ricci v. Okin, was filed to upgrade conditions at Fernald and several other state institutions for persons with intellectual disability in Massachusetts.

A result for Fernald residents of the class action suit which took effect in 1993 was the provision of "a guaranteed level of care, regardless of cost, to compensate for decades of neglect and abuse".

According to a December 13, 2004 article in the Boston Globe,[citation needed] Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney announced in 2003 that the facility would be closed and the land sold by 2007.

[citation needed] In an August 14, 2007 ruling, Judge Tauro ordered the Department of Mental Retardation to consider the individual wishes of all 185 institution residents before closing the facility.

Those advocacy organizations proposed a "postage-stamp" plan under which Fernald would be scaled back in size and the remaining portion of the campus sold for development.

[citation needed] A significant portion of the Waltham campus, encompassing its facilities established through Fernald's tenure, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.

[32] While many suggestions were made around walking paths, gardens, and other passive recreation facilities, the majority of the meeting focused on the need to honor and respect the history of Fernald and the treatment of the residents.

In January 2024, Oliver Egger, a journalist and great-great-grandson of Walter Fernald, wrote an investigative piece in The Boston Globe describing how, despite knowledge by the City of Waltham and the state, thousands of confidential patient records were left on the campus after its closure.

[37] In April 2024, The Globe reported that in addition the Massachusetts State Police left decades’ worth of confidential case files at the school for years, removing them in 2017.