Written By Lillian Stockford

The abandonment of a place is the abandonment of its memory. When UConn acquired the land of the Mansfield Training School it also became one of the holders of its history. They have since left the memory to rot in the minds of the community and allowed the buildings of the campus to fall to pieces. They left records to decay on the floor of the Knight Hospital and we will never know what those records said or what pieces of the puzzle they could have provided. Instead, those abandoned documents had to be deemed irrecoverable after sitting for almost 30 years, from the closing of MTS in April 1993 to the spring of 2021. This disrespect of the documents is indicative of the larger trend concerning the property itself –and by extension, a grave disrespect for all the people who resided and worked there. Trees grow out from the underside of the buildings, rooms remain with fire damage, and fenced-off buildings are full of asbestos. An overall sense of desertion hangs over the campus.