CT Mirror

English professor Brenda Brueggemann had driven by the memorial stone, the grassy grove, and the architectural shells of the shuttered institution every day for years on her way to teach at the University of Connecticut. The campus of the former Mansfield Training School, a state institution that, until the early 1990s, had housed people with intellectual disabilities, was now nothing more than a labyrinth of empty buildings along a stretch of Route 44, overgrown with ivy and left to rot on the inside. Then in 2022, a student of Brueggemann’s, who was researching how individuals with disabilities were treated in university settings, started digging through UConn’s archives. The work would lead to what Brueggemann called a “dark realization” about the history that was hiding in plain sight.