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They were the forgotten, the hundreds of mentally ill patients who lived out their lives at Westboro State Hospital and whose remains, unclaimed by family or friends, were laid to rest in unmarked graves in a potter's field at Pine Grove Cemetery here.
On Saturday a special ceremony at the cemetery acknowledged - and remembered - these forgotten souls, nameless for decades.
"Everybody is worthy of being remembered," said one of the speakers, Diane Gould, president and chief executive officer of Advocates, a Framingham-based human services organization.
"Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has said that memory is the basis for humanity," she said, "that it is memory that will save us."
The event paid tribute to hundreds of state hospital patients buried with no names, "as though their lives were unimportant and they did not matter," Ms. Gould said.
What was founded as Westboro Insane Hospital in 1884 served until 2010 as a facility for those diagnosed with mental illness.
The northeast corner of Pine Grove Cemetery at 106 South St. is the site of more than 500 graves of state hospital patients whose unclaimed remains were buried there over three-quarters of a century. The graves were unmarked, except for numbers, grown over with grass. The names and birth dates of the departed went unrecorded.
A grass-roots effort to commemorate these unknown state hospital patients has been spearheaded by Glenn Malloy of Framingham, a former trustee at the hospital.
He and fellow volunteers on the Westboro State Hospital Cemetery Project Committee have set out to research the names of all those buried in the unmarked graves and to raise $30,000 to fund a memorial.
Their stated aim: to "raise public awareness of these forgotten souls and finally afford these people the dignity they deserve."
Those who have joined the effort include Westboro's cemetery director, Don Gale; George Barrette, chairman of the Board of Selectmen; architect Ed Clinton; and, Sarah Utka of Advocates. The committee is open to everyone in the community.
