The past several months working directly with the Edwards Street THDN casefiles was an exceptionally enriching and important experience to my educational journey. The Fall 2025 semester was a continuation of our summer research, where our team took time to refine our findings to paint an accurate historical depiction of mental health in Worcester. My focus this semester was using the THDN casefiles to emphasize the diversity of people that were in Worcester and using the THDN’s services at the time. The City of Worcester is characterized by this diversity, and narrative experiences from this archive provide a snapshot into the reality experienced by these people between the late 19th and early 20th century.

Our findings were presented in public forums twice over the course of this semester. First, as a Lightning Talk at the Tewksbury Public Health Museum, and second through a more formal panel at the New England Historical Association’s annual conference. Both formats provided a place for us to exercise our skills of turning our findings into digestible information for the public. In addition to this, getting to network with other scholars in historical, public health, and social service fields was extremely valuable, and allowed for my own personal exploration of career paths that I had not considered previously. 

A public collection such as these casefiles is so important to the history of a city, and to ensure that historical mistakes were learned from and not repeated. Our focus on mental health and institutionalization relevant at the time these casefiles were written is an example of this. To look back on this collection and understand the social commentary embedded within it is integral to modern city function. Exposure to these files and collaboration with our interdisciplinary research team has been extremely enlightening and beneficial as a researcher and student. 

During the fall semester of 2025, our team has been able to refine coding lists, read through more casefiles, and really dig deeper into the THDN casefiles to learn more about the Worcester community. One of our biggest accomplishments was being given the opportunity to present at two events: Tewksbury Public Health Day and New England Historical Association (NEHA) conference. Preparing for these presentations required us to reflect on our own individual interest and articulate our findings of the archival collection with our audiences. These presentations pushed us to think about our research methods, interpretations, and how our conclusions could be communicated. The THDN collection undoubtedly revealed itself to be a rich collection that helps us understand broader patterns in Worcester history regarding social stigma, societal attitudes, social welfare, immigration patterns, and many other topics. 

My focus was on the trends of social stigma and the “deserving poor” particularly in the language used by social workers describing clients who sought assistance through the THDN. Specifically, stories of people that were discriminated against based on their skin color, age, and mental development. Several casefiles I encountered had dismissive language towards people that were of African-American descent who were believed to be irresponsible, elderly where were believed to be incapable, and a child who was behind in his age group who was described as “mentally deficient.” Several terms that were used at the time reflected the limited understanding of mental development at the time and the ease at which stigmatizing labels were used. Encountering the language used in the casefiles repeatedly showed how deeply embedded the language at the time focused on pseudoscience and social hierarchy rather than the mental crisis at hand.  

People who struggled with mental crises were cast out from society as an “other,” rather than an individual that needed additional support. Many stories of clients that used the THDN struggled with mental health. Oftentimes, clients became lost in the social welfare system at the time which placed them in mental institutions far from their family and friends.  The conditions and treatment at these mental institutions throughout New England often worsened their existing condition due to poor treatment and constant confinement. 

Spending the last 6 months working with the THDN casefiles has made this pattern increasingly difficult to ignore. The more casefiles we were able to analyze, the more apparent it became that these short descriptions written by social workers were able to justify who was deserving of receiving aid. These notes initially written for intake revealed that social workers thought of themselves highly and were able to influence how an individual was to be treated in the social welfare systems. This realization required me to be more attentive and think more critically when encountering language that once appeared neutral but carried implicit judgement. In addition, the THDN casefiles carried heavy dehumanizing language where these clients' lives were often diminished into few words, numbers, and even lines of text that determined how their overall outcome would be for the next few days to years. Over time, I was able to recognize how age, race, perceived mental ability intersected with the ideas or morality and worthiness at the time reinforcing who was categorized as deserving or undeserving. Through this research, I have been able to approach sensitive material thoughtfully, be able to engage an audience with my work, critically analyze language, and question how documentation can shape our contemporary understandings of social welfare and marginalization. 

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.