Commonly known as the Ladd School, The Dr. Joseph H. Ladd Center was a state facility where youth and adults with disabilities were provided residential, educational, and medical services. But in the early part of the 20th century, it was also known as a feeble-minded school — an institution more closely resembling an almshouse or reformatory.
Long before transforming into a sprawling compound of brick-and-mortar buildings, Rhode Island's School for the Feeble-Minded began on a farm, in 1908, when Dr. Ladd and seven young men from the State Infirmary occupied the old Hoxsie estate; to establish an experimental colony for people with disabilities in the Exeter countryside.
For 48 years, Dr. Joseph H. Ladd was superintendent of the Exeter School. Though an outspoken and lifelong advocate for eugenics, he was once considered a luminary, and a founding father of human services, for having pioneered the institution from a remote 18th century farmhouse to a thriving village of some 1,000 men, women, and children.
But when murder charges were brought against an attendant in the suffocation of a child at the Exeter School in 1956, Dr. Ladd abruptly retired. So for twenty years thereafter, Dr. John Smith was superintendent; a dramatic and controversial figure whose administration, though criticized for its mismanagement, is often credited with the institution’s reform in the 1960s, including the addition of a state-of-the-art hospital and – for the first time in its history – a school building.
Decades of scandal finally came to a head, in 1978, when Dr. Smith was fired amid allegations of ongoing medical malpractice, neglect, and abuse of patients, which had resulted in multiple deaths at the new hospital. The following year, a class action lawsuit was filed charging the state with human rights violations; and in 1982, as part of the settlement, a plan was announced to end institutionalization in Rhode Island. In 1994, the Ladd Center was finally closed when last of its residents returned to the community.
By the turn of the 21st century, the abandoned Ladd School campus had fallen into ruin, securing its station in urban legend as a place of ill fame, rumored to be haunted. Once a destination for photographers, ghost hunters, and vandals, nearly all of its remaining buildings were demolished in 2014, leaving behind little more than a memorial park as a reminder of its existence.