Overview
The Ladd School opened in 1908 at Exeter, Rhode Island, as the state's institution for people then labelled 'feeble-minded' — a custodial world of wards, farms and workshops that grew through mid-century and, like its counterparts nationwide, accumulated a documented record of overcrowding, neglect and abuse that exposés and litigation forced into the light; Rhode Island closed Ladd in 1993 as care moved to the community, an ending advocates count as a civil-rights milestone. The campus decayed, drew trespass and legend, and was subsequently almost entirely demolished, the land passing to state and private hands with buildings gone and access restricted — facts the record states plainly, discouraging any visit. Its ghost telling belongs to the urban-explorer years: voices and cries in the empty wards, figures at windows, shadow shapes in tunnels — accounts this record keeps brief and firmly secondary, because the site's meaning is its residents: people who lived confined lives and deserved better, remembered now by survivors and historians. Present Ladd as remembrance, not destination.