century association biographical archive

Earliest Members of the Century Association

View all members

Walter E. Fernald

Superintendent, Massachusetts School for the Feebleminded

Centurion, 1919–1924

Full Name Walter Elmore Fernald

Born 11 February 1859 in Kittery, Maine

Died 26 November 1924 in Waverly, Massachusetts

Buried Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Proposed by Walter B. James and Franklin B. Kirkbride

Elected 7 June 1919 at age sixty

Century Memorial

Walter Elmore Fernald had made the care and cure of mental disease his life-work. During the unusually long period of thirty-seven years he had been Superintendent of the Massachusetts School for Feeble-Minded; teaching and lecturing in the meantime on his specialty at Harvard, Tufts, and elsewhere. Because of Dr. Fernald’s residence outside New York, and the recent date of his admission to the Century, he was not widely known in the Club; but he had made his mark on his profession.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1925 Century Association Yearbook