The Tewksbury, MA Insane Asylum

The Tewksbury Almshouse was authorized by an act of the Massachusetts General Court in 1852 and opened in May 1854, accepting what was then known as the “pauper insane.” It was the state’s first facility to accept the chronically insane. The Tewksbury Hospital Cemetery holds 10,000 unmarked graves from the people who resided at the insane asylum from the mid 1850's to the early 1900's. Many experiments were performed on the people that had no family to advocate for them. Sound familiar? History indeed repeats itself in some form or the other.....