Take a Disability History Hike with your Team
Enjoy a 3-hour guided walk around a nationally significant historic site in the disability rights movement. You will learn about the history of disability rights in the United States – the good and the bad, key moments, and the deep historic connection that Massachusetts has had to this history. Each tour is co-led by a person with a disability.
History teaches us, but it is what we do with those lessons that matters most. If your group is interested in a disability history hike where your team can learn, reflect, and grow together while exploring the outdoors, we would love to talk with you.
Contact Executive Director, Dan Minnich, today to learn more about bringing your team on the trail with Waypoint Adventure.
On a September morning, twenty staff members from AvalonBay Communities joined us for our first disability history hike. Our trail stretched from Rock Meadow in Belmont to the MetFern Cemetery in Waltham. Led by Waypoint Adventure’s Co-founder and Executive Director, Dan Minnich, and Leaders-in-Training alumni, Adam Roberge, the group gathered for a day filled with stories that asked us to slow down and listen closely.
We started in a circle, a Waypoint tradition. Dan invited everyone to name a challenge they anticipated, whether physical, emotional, or mental, and to recognize that what feels difficult for one person may not for another. Stepping outside of the workplace and into unfamiliar woods brought its own kind of challenge. Each person set an intention to guide them through the day.
A Hike into the Fernald’s Past
Our hike led us through fields and into the layered history of the Fernald State School, once called the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded. When Walter E. Fernald took charge in 1887, he inherited a school that was overcrowded and neglected. His early years were marked by ambition and idealism, envisioning a school that combined classroom learning with vocational training. Fernald expanded the campus and promoted a model that blended literacy with practical skills, echoing Montessori-style methods and object lessons. In its early years, the school drew visitors from around the world who came to see what was described as a “utopia” in Waltham.
As the decades moved on, the vision darkened. Fernald began using terms like “defective delinquents” and advocating for permanent segregation. His words grew entangled with the rise of eugenics, a movement that claimed disability was tied to criminality and unfitness. Though he did not support forced sterilization, his influence strengthened a culture that devalued autonomy and removed thousands of people with disabilities from community life.
In his later years, Fernald began to question those beliefs. He commissioned follow-up studies on former residents and found many were working and thriving in community, contradicting eugenic assumptions. He spoke against mass institutionalization and rejected sterilization campaigns. By the time he died in 1924, he was both celebrated and conflicted. Massachusetts lowered state flags to half-staff in his honor, even as the seeds of institutional injustice were still taking root.
As we paused along the hike, we spoke about the radioactive oatmeal experiments of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Researchers from MIT and Harvard, working with Quaker Oats, gave boys living at Fernald oatmeal and milk mixed with small amounts of radioactive tracers. The children were told they were joining a “science club.” They were never informed about what was in their food, and permission was never sought. Decades later, a lawsuit and settlement acknowledged the harm that had been done. The story remains a clear example of how people with disabilities in institutions were treated as subjects of research rather than as children with rights and agency.
We continued toward the MetFern Cemetery, is an institutional burial ground in Waltham, Massachusetts, where 296 inmates of the Metropolitan State Hospital and Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center were interred between 1947 and 1979. Gravestones are marked only with numbers and C or P, denoting their presumed religion, Catholic or Protestant. Along the way, we shared short biographies of some of the people buried there. Reading their stories turned those numbers into lives once lived, with routines, joys, struggles, hopes and moments of meaning. It reminded us that dignity had been taken, and that remembering is one way to give it back.
LIT alumni Adam reflected, “Nobody’s names are written on the graves. I believe there should be a memorial acknowledging what happened at the Fernald School. It is important to educate people about what happened as they build upon disability awareness.”
Closing the Circle
We ended the hike as we had begun, gathered in a circle. The group settled into reflection. One by one, people spoke about what stayed with them. Some mentioned the weight of walking past gravestones marked only with numbers. Others spoke of anger at hearing how children were deceived in the oatmeal experiments. A few admitted they had never known this history, and were sitting with a kind of unease that comes from realizing how close the past still is.
There were also voices that leaned toward possibility. We wondered aloud how stories like these might reshape our own workplaces, how awareness might shift the way we think about inclusion, or even the way we greet a neighbor who experiences the world differently. In this circle, we shared Waypoint Adventure’s CAP Sauce framework: Community, Access, Preparation. We talked about community as something that does not appear on its own, but is cultivated through shared effort. Access as more than a ramp or an open door, but an attitude of welcome and adaptability. Preparation as the willingness to do the work, to learn the history, and to set the conditions for people to thrive.
Adam shared, “As we hiked back to Rock Meadow, it felt like I had known the people from Avalon Apartments longer than I had since we all got to know each other on the hike. It was nice having the staff from Avalon with us and I am glad they got to check out equipment that is available to participants.”
Why it Matters
History lives in the outdoors that hold traces of choices once made and choices still before us. It is written in numbered stones, in buildings left behind, and in stories that surface when people are willing to listen. The Fernald grounds are a record of what was done to people with disabilities and a reminder of how society has often defined belonging in ways that excluded.
Hiking these paths is one way of remembering. It is also a way of practicing responsibility. To remember is to refuse silence. It is to recognize that people with disabilities were too often treated as less than fully human, and that the consequences of those attitudes continue in subtle and overt forms today.
When a group hikes together through this history, the act becomes more than physical movement. It becomes a shared reckoning. The conversation shifts from the past to the present. Questions rise: How do we ensure dignity is not taken again? How do we design spaces in spaces in work, in schools, in cities, in the outdoors, in life where every person is recognized as capable of purpose, joy, and contribution?
Commemoration only matters if it changes how we live now. Turning memory into responsibility means noticing where exclusion still happens. Turning awareness into action means building practices and policies that welcome people with disabilities fully into community life. Committing to futures that honor dignity means seeing access not as a favor or an afterthought, but as the fabric of a just society.
This is why the hike matters. It is a chance to stand in the presence of history and to decide, together, how not to repeat it. It is an opportunity to let remembrance shape the way we lead, the way we work, and the way we live alongside one another.
