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Massachusetts is known for many things, including the Boston Tea Party, the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Sox, and its famous clam chowder. It is also significant for having some of America’s earliest asylums and institutions.
Photographer Dave Snook invites you to join him on a duck boat tour of an island that once housed unwed mothers, the sick, and the poor in institutional care facilities. Afterward, we’ll head to the mainland to explore some of the first asylums in America, where individuals deemed insane were confined.
Finally, we will visit America's first children’s institutions, particularly a well-known state school recognized as the birthplace of Special Education, which also has a dark history involving the feeding of radioactive oatmeal to children as part of a science experiment.
So, grab a coffee, because this duck boat is about to depart for a tour of the abandoned asylums and institutions of the Bay State.
Dave Snook is a Massachusetts-based photographer who has been documenting abandoned asylums since the early 2000s. His love for mental health history, architecture, and preservation got him started in asylum photography at a young age. Because preservation isn’t always an option, he made it his goal to document as many asylums as possible before they are gone. He hopes to capture the history and energy of each place with his photographs and share them with you. He continues to document and fight for preservation to this day. Most of his work can be viewed is on his website: www.Insanectuary.com.
