Editor’s Note: Ashten Vassar has contributed to The Daily Campus Opinion section.
The University of Connecticut’s Depot Campus has housed the shell of an abandoned building, the Mansfield Training School (MTS), for over 30 years. The MTS was a disability institution that operated from 1860 to 1993, where people with “developmental disabilities” could be admitted. At its peak, the institution had over 1,600 patients.
The institution shut down after 133 years of operation following lawsuits alleging poor conditions and treatment of patients. Since then, multiple accounts have come out from former patients and employees, including former patients Jimmy Lundquist and Gladys Burr, about overcrowding, patients being forced to work with no pay and severe beatings.
After its closure, the land’s ownership was transferred to UConn.
However, some people allege that the poor treatment of patients doesn’t end there. Researchers and a former visitor believe that some patients may have been buried on the property after passing away.
In October, a woman reached out to The Daily Campus about the MTS and a tour that her mother had done of the institution in the 1970s, in which she said that her mother was “horrified by the conditions and the neglect and…abuse to patients.”
“[My mother] believes that the reason they protect it so carefully is because at one time when patients would die, they would hide it and bury them on the grounds. If they were to try to demolish it, they would find the remains of humans,” said the woman in her email.
In further conversations, the woman said that during the tour, her mother saw ground dug up that “looked like graves because of the size of it and there would be mounds of dirt.” She also said that in certain areas it “looked like the grass had started to grow and something had been dug there.”
According to the woman, when her mother had asked what the holes were for, “people would get angry.”
The woman also talked about the conditions her mother witnessed, including “people tied into beds…people being extremely medicated, so they weren’t even functional, laying there, drooling,” and it “being very cold and more institutionalized like a jail than a place to care and help people.”
In 2022, Jess Gallagher started the Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum as a part of her thesis at UConn. This project “aims to preserve the nearly erased, and over 100-year long, history of the Mansfield Training School in order to remember the lives, voices, and experiences of those who were institutionalized here,” according to its website. Since 2022, the project has grown to involve multiple other researchers.
Gallagher and Ashten Vassar, a researcher on the project, believe that, given the history of other similar institutions, it’s possible patients were buried on the grounds of MTS after their death.
“We don’t want to say for sure what would have happened, but we know from other institutions, it would be naive to say that nobody was buried on the property,” said Vassar. “Historically, institutions like this have cemeteries.”
According to Gallagher and Vassar, it was not uncommon for patients to pass away while residing at MTS. Vassar said that patients could pass away due to the conditions, and records collected by the Mansfield Historical Society show that between 1918 and 1919, approximately 30 patients died during the influenza epidemic.
Many documents relating to the history of the Mansfield Training School, including death certificates and annual reports that detail how many patients died, are not publicly available due to their contents containing personal information about former employees and patients. Through their research, Gallagher and Vassar were able to look at some of these documents.
Gallagher and Vassar talked about information they learned from reviewing patient death certificates.
“Whenever we see a death certificate that came out of Mansfield Training School, they will always list two causes of death. The first cause of death will usually be what the person was diagnosed with… exhaustion from epilepsy or ‘imbecility,’ and then they’ll list a second cause of death, like blunt force trauma from falling during a seizure… or some sort of illness that is usually very easily transmissible in close quarters,” Vassar said. “I thought that it was very interesting, because you can have exhaustion from imbecility as the official cause of death, but then the second note will say drowning.”
According to Vassar, some death certificates do not list any place of burial.
“For most of [the death certificates], [their place of burial is listed]. There are some without that information filled in… I’ve been trying to cross reference that with the online website Find a Grave and also the cemeteries themselves. I’ve been able to visit a few residents that way… I guess it was negligent record keeping,” Vassar said. “For others, I don’t think that there’s any record of where they ended up.”
UConn Spokesperson Stephanie Reitz commented to the Daily Campus on the possibility of bodies at the Mansfield Training School.
“Surveys of the property before and after it was assigned to UConn’s control do not list a cemetery on its 435 acres, as some other Connecticut residential training schools had on their sites,” Reitz said. “Some former MTS employees have told UConn that when patients passed away, their families either arranged for burials at cemeteries of their choosing; or, that those who were not claimed were transported for burial in other state-operated cemeteries such as at the Southbury Training School and in Middletown.”
Reitz mentioned that urns used to be buried at a memorial garden across the street from the Depot Campus, but they have since been removed.
“While reviewing records and contacting retired UConn employees familiar with the site’s history, we learned that one area on the north side of Route 44 (across the street from the Depot Campus) once held urns that had been buried in a memorial garden. Those urns were removed many years ago,” Reitz said.
Reitz said that “UConn does not have plans to conduct a survey on the Depot Campus property until and unless there is compelling evidence of burial ground locations.”
The Daily Campus reached out to three former MTS employees to ask about the possibility of bodies. One declined an interview and another has yet to respond. One employee responded and participated in an interview with the Daily Campus.
The employee, who worked in “grounds and transportation” from 1987 to 1991, does not believe any bodies were ever buried on site.
“I’m not aware ever of a body being buried. Now, certainly some of the patients when they passed away were cremated, according to their or their family’s wishes, and sometimes I believe I heard stories that people’s ashes were spread at a particular part of the property,” the employee said. “I do know that there had been an area where urns of ashes had been buried at one time, but I was told… that all of those were resolved before the training school closed.”
Gallagher and Vassar confirmed that urns on the property were relocated, but that one cannot know for sure whether or not bodies are buried on the grounds without a survey of the land.
“I would say that it is impossible to say for sure without an official land survey being done… because this institution was open for over 100 years,” Vassar said. “It would be incredibly naive to say that… there is absolutely nobody still buried there.”
The MTS Memorial and Museum is currently working to find more evidence of bodies being buried at the institution.