Stolpersteine: Memory Stones

August 19, 2025 - Tona Hangen

As you can read below, the 2025 summer team has dug deeper into some of the more troubling aspects of the THDN collection, specifically how the Home was embedded in a larger system of diagnosis, treatment, and care (often woefully inadequate institutional custodial care) for some of society's most vulnerable people: those with physical, mental or emotional disabilities. We're interested in how people experiencing these challenges maintained their agency, dignity and voice, even as the medical and political establishment may have treated them as disposable, undeserving, criminal, or weak. 

At the same time, I've been preparing fall courses, including one on History and Memory, and in the course of my reading I encountered the term "stolpersteine," or literally, "stumbling stones." These are small concrete blocks topped with brass plaques placed into the sidewalk outside the homes of the last freely-chosen residence of people disappeared by the Nazi regime in Germany and other countries under Nazi occupation during World War II, bearing that person's name and life dates. They're designed to interrupt a pedestrian's walk -- to make them stop and consider what happened there. They were first conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in the 1990s, as a "decentralized memorial" of the Holocaust's victims, and there are over 100,000 of them in various locations. 

While there are vast differences between victims of Nazi persecution and people in our own region who were recorded in official records of state institutions, there is something about the concept of stolperstein that resonates on a common frequency with the work we've done this summer. Early in the summer a Massachusetts state commission released a huge multi-year report documenting the forgotten history of the huge state institutional system, its now largely-neglected properties and physical facilities, and the often hidden histories of its residents and the impact that their treatment, incarceration, or institutionalization had on their families and communities. As a team we've taken time to visit some of the final resting places of state hospital patients -- not out of morbid curiosity or prurient sensationalism of the supernatural -- but to respect the dignity and humanity of our subjects and to contribute to a better collective memory of the past of people with a wide variety of conditions that once doomed them to live apart from society. 

Yes, it's been a busy summer. And yes, we're working to create a database. But the people in it are not just "data" to us. It's good to pause, even to stumble, on their histories and the ground they occupy even now, and to take a moment for reflection.

One unique collection within the Museum of Worcester are albums documenting patients in the Worcester state hospital around 1890. These volumes included photographs that resembled mugshots: stark, front facing portraits that reduced an individual to an institutional image. At the front of each book, there was an index that included the patient name, their assigned number, and the page number their picture can be found on. This organizational system underscored the dehumanizing nature of institutional recordkeeping, where an identity was filtered through numbers rather than personal history. In these books and intake cards, patients are described as “feeble-minded” and “insane,” words that are not used in medical terminal terminology today. 

What we see in the archive draws a parallel with a 1967 documentary our research team studied called Titicut Follies, directed by Frederick Wiseman, which exposed the harsh conditions of Massachusetts prisoners at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. Inmates at the Bridgewater State Hospital were stripped of their clothing, faced both verbal and physical assault from guards, were treated with little to no care, and faced dehumanization from the moment they stepped foot into the asylum. Furthermore, scenes within the film follow the worsening physical conditions of an inmate's body within the asylum as they are “treated” there. Treatment of inmates would include living in cells without furniture, inmates who did not follow bathing procedures would be left in unsanitary conditions, and inmates ultimately lost autonomy. The loss of autonomy left inmates with frustration and anxiety which left many of them to pace nervously around rooms, bang on doors in desperation, screaming or lash out, and for others, losing the desire to eat or even to live. This was an unsettling reminder that institutional neglect, power imbalance, and loss of dignity can be as damaging as the illness itself. 

By connecting these archival materials with the visual record of Titicut Follies, this research underscores the persistence of institutional practices that stripped away humanity under the guise of care. Although these systems were built to help the “mentally ill” or “mentally insane”, the harsh reality was that these institutions made recovering and reintegration into society all the more difficult.  

A Visit to the THDN

July 23, 2024 - Tiernan O'Neal

The Edward Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery (THDN) moved into their newly constructed building on 10 Edward Street in 1910. The Edward Street building, only a 5 minute walk from UMASS Memorial Hospital, faithfully served women and children until its closure in the early 2000s. Today the building is occupied by the Rainbow Child Development Center, which serves over 300 children. All summer, we’ve read stories about women staying in the temporary home for a night, a couple weeks, or a couple of months. We’ve read stories about children getting cared for by the day nursery while their parents worked. We’ve read personal narratives, letters, official correspondences, and newspaper clippings. Yet, we could only imagine what the building’s interior looked like until this point. Today, Professor Hangen, Maroua, and I took a trip to 10 Edward Street to get a better understanding of the building’s interior. Paula Perrier, the executive director, greeted us with enthusiasm when we arrived at the Rainbow Child Development Center. I was surprised by how old – yet at the same time, how modern – the building was. Of course, after 100 years, there were some minor renovations. There were freshly painted walls and cheerful new rooms, but the building’s original architecture remained front and center. The kitchen and butler’s pantry had the original cabinets and several rooms had mahogany doors. The wood creaked beneath our feet as we shuffled from one classroom to the next and up the stairs, wondering what the original purpose of each room was. We were able to find the third-floor parlor, which is now being used as a meeting room. The staff’s offices were clearly old temporary home rooms. The isolation ward, now used as offices, had a glued-shut dumbwaiter that was used to bring up food from the kitchen below for the sick patients. Most rooms had a fireplace, though 98% of the fireplaces were sealed off for safety reasons. Walking through a building and knowing what stories were going in and out each room felt weird. While the Edward Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery no longer exists, I’m sure Miss Charlotte Emerson and the staff would feel satisfied knowing that their building is continuing to be used as a center for children.

Learning from Our Research

Jul 23, 2024 - Maraoua Rahaoui 

I suppose what drew me most to learning about the Temporary Home and Day Nursery, a place I’ve never heard of before as a Worcester resident, was the historical context. I was so very curious about what life was like in the 1910s in Worcester, what the societal norms were like and how that affected charity organizations like this one. As we began to take it all apart, digging deeper into the records and files, we found stories upon stories. Through those, we were able to infer somewhat of the setting, but not enough. It wasn’t until we went to explore other archives beyond our own, to Simmons University and reaching out to a professor with a similar project from Illinois, that we began to understand the true complexities and layers of the cultural norms during this period of more than 100 years ago. The Temporary Home and Day Nursery (THDN) on 10 Edwards Street, Worcester, Mass was not the first of its kind, and it wouldn’t be the last. In fact, after it closed in the early 2000s, the building became home to another local day care center called Rainbow Development Center that was originally located in the same neighborhood in the 1970s, and is now in the same building, replacing the original. 

Charities in this era were interconnected. Many women applying to stay in the THDN were single or jobless, while some were sick mothers who had nowhere else to take their children. Of course this wouldn’t be the only place they turned to for help. They had the Travelers Aid Society, the Worcester Children’s Friend Society, Associated Charities, and countless others interconnected across the city and state. What’s interesting is that we see the stories of these women and mothers primarily through the eyes of the charity workers, often wealthy women from respectable families. Philanthropy was a huge trend in this time amongst the upper classes, and some wealthy women believed it to be their responsibility to society to give the children home care to restore the societal norm of what a proper American household should look like and run like. However, despite all of that, it’s inspiring to see women of this time, from Charlotte Emerson (superintendent of the THDN for 30 years+) to Isabella Gardner (Bostonian art collector and philanthropist) to Jane Addams (founder of Hull House), starting these homes in the first place, fundraising for them, designing them, creating schedules, and making sure they run efficiently. It was run by women for women, and to see their legacies today is truly awe-inspiring.