History of the Faribault State Hospital, 1879-1998

After the last of the Wahpekute were forced out of Faribault, settlers began to farm their newly claimed land. According to plate maps drawn in the 1870s, settlers were growing corn, oats, wheat, and potatoes at this time.

In March of 1879, ownership of the land was transferred from the U.S. government to the state after the Minnesota Institute for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind was authorized to open an experimental school for “imbeciles.” The Institute’s board subsequently purchased 726 acres of land from local dairy farmer George M. Gilmore. This land included present-day Rustad Road, as well as the Wahpekute’s Inyan Tonka, and was used for what later became the “Experimental School for Imbeciles.” The school’s name changed several times throughout its history, each change reflective of the school’s changing functions and clientele. At the time of its closure, the school had come under the authority of the state and was known as the Faribault State School and Hospital.

The School officially opened in July of 1979, serving 15 students in its inaugural class. As dictated by the board, the school was intended for “such children and youth as had drifted into the Insane Hospitals of the State and were found to be imbecile and feeble-minded, rather than lunatic, and seemed capable of improvement and instruction.” Thus, much of the instruction students received was in semi-skilled labor, such as sewing, fishing, basket-weaving, and farming. The land known as the ‘Walcott Farm,’ was used as recreational farmland for the School’s patients, as well as for a dairy and piggery. Students completed most of the school’s farming operations themselves, either by milking the cows, tending to the pigs, or harvesting the vegetables.

For much of its lifespan, the school functioned more as a boarding house than as an institution of education. Common understandings of mental illness and disability determined the “afflicted” to be ultimately incurable and therefore unworthy of education. Several laws were passed during the first half of the twentieth century which facilitated the school’s role as a boarding house. In 1917, the Minnesota legislature passed a law “providing for the involuntary commitment of mentally deficient persons to state guardianship.” In 1924, a law was passed to legalize the sterilization of the “mentally deficient” as determined by the state’s medical facilities, including Faribault’s (contemporaneously known as the Minnesota School for the Feeble-Minded and Colony for Epileptics).

In 1972, the Department of Public Welfare nominated the School for closure. As the standard of care for mentally disabled adolescents became a topic of controversy, enrollment rates declined.  A large portion of the School’s staff was dismissed and several of the school’s unused and deteriorating buildings were demolished. While those who remained employed by the school adamantly protested the DPW’s recommendation, the school eventually closed in 1998. As the state’s first institution for the mentally disabled, the school had served more than 20,000 patients by the end of its tenure.

Upon the School’s closure, 1,000 state prisoners were moved into the remaining buildings. As a result, little physical evidence of the School’s presence is accessible to the public.

Below is a hand drawn floor plan of the School’s layout circa 1961. The location and size of each building was determined using chronologies, memos, reports, brochures, and other primary sources published by the School. The lands bordering the School are currently protected by the River Bend Nature Center, a private non-profit organization discussed in the following chapter.

Click the buildings in blue for photographs and additional information!