Since its establishment in 1925, the District Training School for the Mentally Retarded has focused more on hiding people with developmental or physical problems from view than on curing them. Congress selected Laurel, Maryland as the school’s location due to its rural setting and to replace the egregiously called Washington Home for Colored Idiots, which the neighborhood’s citizens had pushed politicians to shut. About 300 acres and 22 structures, including a canteen, leisure center, gym, theater, baseball field, hospital, church, administrative offices, school buildings, dorms, and a farm, made up the new training school’s site.
It is challenging to determine the precise moment at which the District Training School changed from a comparatively safe treatment and training facility to “the deadliest known example of institutional abuse in recent American history,” according to one investigating attorney. At least at first, everything seemed routine. Then, in 1954, a man was detained in Pennsylvania on accusations of white slavery for transporting a student from the school to York “for purposes of prostitution.” However, there is little evidence to suggest that this was more than a singular incidence.
Many of the country’s institutions and asylums came to an end with the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s. The general consensus had started to change, with many increasingly believing that community-based treatment was more effective and compassionate. Horrible rumors, like the suicides of four young people in solitude at Forest Haven, spread across the neighborhood. Evans et al. v. Washington, a historic class-action case, was the bombshell. It claimed that residents’ constitutional rights had been violated by Forest Haven’s harsh treatment. The lawsuit, which was brought by Betty Evans after her 18-year-old daughter Joy passed away, revealed a horrific tale of abuse and neglect.
It must have looked like a huge win when the Justice Department entered the case and it was resolved in 1978. The plan called for closing Forest Haven, moving the inhabitants into group homes, and providing them with a healthy diet. Forest Haven would stay open until October 14, 1991, in spite of the local government’s assurance, killing people and providing them with inadequate care and nourishment throughout that period. Federal District Judge John Pratt responded to the Justice Department’s efforts to expedite the closure due to the deaths with hardened indifference, reasoning that these people “are not in the best of health probably,” any of whom could be affected by the deaths. A proposal to spend $24,698 to train workers in proper feeding technique was shot down due to lack of funds.
The Forest Haven morgue, all rotten. You can see a Stokes Basket propped up against the window.
One of the first abandoned locations I went to was Forest Haven. Even though I was unaware of how horrifying its past was, the site soon made an amazing impression on me. Tucked somewhere in the forest between the Woodland Job Corps Center, the juvenile incarceration center known as the Oak Hill Youth Center, and the National Security Agency headquarters, strange voices and jumbled pronouncements periodically broke the stillness. I was unaware of Forest Haven’s closing due to a terrible separation from residents’ well-being and the graves on campus that had been exposed by erosion.
Over the years, every time I went back to Forest Haven, I discovered more disturbing information. The empty shoes that were scattered around, the spring-mounted horse that got lost in the weeds outside the playground, and the bags piled in a storage room that had contained the occupants’ possessions upon moving in were all there. There were the children’s small braces and crutches and the big cribs that were always in the halls and basements. The offices’ carpet of paperwork revealed peeks into things that were unthinkable. A doctor expressed his fury over the unfeasible working circumstances and the terrible impact on the inhabitants in one document, saying, “Her main dental issue is severe periodontal disease brought on by poor oral hygiene. She has gingivitis that is rather bad.
In a dimly lit hallway within the abandoned Oak Hill Youth Center, there are faceless CPR dummies.
As group homes are run by for-profit entrepreneurs who live in multimillion-dollar villas yet claim not to be able to purchase toilet paper for the inhabitants, the same disregard, supervision, uncontrolled abuse, and public apathy persist. When Forest Haven was open, people died as a result of the severely subpar treatment given by a doctor whose license was suspended.
