Exploring the newspaper articles that chronicle her path to the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded. Read the Plain Language version over on Substack. Many thanks to the Gloucester Lyceum, the Sawyer Free Library, and Community History Archive for digitizing these newspapers and making them freely accessible and searchable.
In 1900, Mary Fonsic was sixteen years old. She lived on Essex Avenue in Gloucester, Massachusetts with her mother, her stepfather, and her siblings, Maurice, Albertina, Anthony, and Carrie. She attended school, and was able to read and write. Her mother, father, and step-father were all Portuguese immigrants. The family attended weekly Mass at St. Ann’s church. And every day, a newspaper boy almost certainly delivered a copy of the Gloucester Daily Times to their front doorstep.
Newspapers in the early 20th century contained more than just “local news” as we think of it today. Like Facebook today, they was also packed with eye-catching and bizarre advertisements, gossip, sensationalized and questionably truthful stories, police reports, and pictures from your aunt’s friend’s vacation to Nantucket. Mary’s siblings would feature in the newspaper semi-regularly over the next 35 years. They reported on Maurice’s lifelong involvement in local theater, as well as his surprisingly successful lawsuit against the City of Gloucester after he hit a city fire hydrant with his car. They chronicled the death of Carrie’s firstborn daughter Lorena in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, Albertina’s 3(!) marriages, and Anthony’s teenage job driving a horse-drawn carriage to deliver milk.
But Mary barely appears in the paper–excepting obituaries, she is referenced only during a short, 8-day period in August of 1900, shortly preceding her admittance to the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded.
This first article appears on August 13th, 1900.
It’s interesting to me that this first article hints at an assumed knowledge of Mary’s history. The Times was a local newspaper, and Gloucester’s population at the time was around 26,000. For context, my current local paper serves a population of 81,000, and the local paper of my childhood served a community of over 100,000–yet I still routinely recognize names and faces. So, if the “trouble” Mary was causing was public enough, it would make sense for the newspaper to refer to her in this way.
What kind of “trouble” is left unspoken, however. What “actions” prompted a medical examination? Whether the actions or symptoms she presented were indicative of intellectual disability or some type of teenage rebellion is unknown. At the time, both could easily result in institutionalization.
Sending the girl to “some school or home” is also carefully phrased to avoid less comfortable words like “hospital”, “insane”, or “idiot”. The concept of institutions in 1900 were still firmly rooted in the belief that people with intellectual disabilities could be “fixed” by education and moral teachings. And calling it a “school” also softens the blow to the rest of the family–in 1900, as eugenics was beginning to gain a foothold, having a family member institutionalized was shameful and considered evidence that the rest of the family was morally or genetically weak.
Mary’s mother, also, confusingly, named Mary, was clearly upset by the article. The following correction appears the next day:
Mary Martin’s response, published August 14th, 1900.
Despite their sarcastic response to Mary Martin here, the Times did indeed make a statement about the physician’s findings (see their previous article).
Mrs. Martin’s response gives us some new information about the situation. It seems important to Mrs. Martin that the public understand that the doctors found her daughter to be feeble-minded (intellectually disabled). My best guess here is that she wanted her neighbors to understand that she wasn’t sending her daughter away for convenience–her daughter really did have a condition which required “medical attention” and that she would be receiving “good care”. Whether Mary Martin was a woman who cared deeply about her daughter’s well being, her own public image, or both, we will honestly never know.
The final article about Mary is published one week later.
Published in the Gloucester Daily Times, August 21st, 1900.
Finally, some clues about Mary’s behavior that likely prompted the doctor’s visit. A “mania for running away” suggests that this has been an ongoing problem. Now, of course there are many reasons that 16 year old girls run away from home unrelated to intellectual disability, and that’s certainly possible here. But to me, this sounds more similar to the wanderings of Hugh Blair than a rebellious teenager. She wasn’t found with friends or a boyfriend, and she wasn’t at a train station or bus depot. She travelled less than two miles in fifteen hours, walking from West Gloucester, where her family had recently moved, to Main Street in Gloucester, the neighborhood she had lived for most of her life.
This is the last we hear about Mary in the paper. Perhaps it was shortly after this adventure that she was sent to the Massachusetts School for Idiotic & Feeble-Minded Youth, later renamed the Walter E. Fernald State School, where she would spend the rest of her life. Or perhaps there were more incidents like these that simply were not interesting enough to make the daily paper. But by 1910, the census records her as an “inmate”.
Soon, I want to share more about what we can infer about Mary’s life–details from Fernald and places like it, how institutions like Fernald changed over the early 20th century, and what life was like there. I have some pretty interesting primary sources, and I’m working to track down more.