Aubrey D. Lapolice Collection
Born in Chicopee Falls, Mass., Aubrey D. Lapolice (1893-1981) was a maintenance superintendent at the Belchertown State School for a forty year period, from the time of its establishment through his retirement in 1961. A veteran of the First World War, he oversaw a campus of nearly 850 acres and a physical plant of nearly one hundred buildings and structures. He died in February 1981.
The Lapolice collection includes 35 images of the physical plant and construction projects at the Belchertown State School during its first two decades of operation and 21 images of the welcome home parade in Belchertown in 1946 for returning American troops.
A long-time maintenance supervisor at the Belchertown State School, Aubrey Daniel Lapolice, was the only son of four children of a working-class family from Chicopee Falls, Mass. Born on April 22, 1893, Aubrey was just ten when his father, Joseph, a section hand on the railroad, and mother Anna relocated to Belchertown, and in 1910, the census records that they had added four young girls — “state charges” — to their household.
After service in the 76th Division during the First World War, Lapolice returned home and within a fairly short time, secured a position in maintenance at the Belchtertown State School. The School had been authorized in 1915 as the Commonwealth’s third institution, after Fernald and Wrentham, for the care of “feeble-minded children,” and the first in western Massachusetts. At the time Lapolice began, the school was overseen by Wrentham, operating as a farm colony while construction of the dormitory and administrative and support buildings was under way. The school officially opened on November 15, 1922, with the arrival of a transfer of 65 boys from the Fernald School and, two weeks later, an additional 128 boys from both Fernald and Wrentham.
As superintendent of maintenance, Lapolice was involved in construction projects and maintenance around the campus of nearly 850 acres and a physical plant of nearly one hundred buildings and structures as of the date of his retirement in 1961, including farm buildings, a power plant, support buildings, and 7,846 linear feet of concrete tunnels.
Lapolice married Catherine Leary in 1918 (1888-1955), raising a daughter Kathleen Marie (later McGrath), who was born in 1924. At the age of 87, Aubrey Lapolice died in Belchertown on Feb. 22, 1981.
Aubrey Lapolice’s collection contains photographs documenting his workplace during the second quarter of the twentieth century: the Belchertown State School. Having begun work at the School before it formally opened and as overseer of maintenance, Lapolice’s images offer important documentation of construction activity and the State School campus.
In addition to the images from the Belchertown State School, the collection includes a wonderful series of 21 photographs of the parade in Belchertown to welcome home servicemen returning from the Second World War and two photographs that appear to come from Lapolice’s father, Joseph Lapolice, taken while he worked on the Hampden Railroad. In 1910, the Hampden Railroad was planned as a connector line between the village of Bondsville (Palmer) and city of Springfield, but while construction commenced, the line never ran because it failed to receive a license to operate from the state.
Gift of Dani McGrath, Feb. 2016.
Processed by I. Eliot Wentworth, Feb. 2016.
)Cite as: Aubrey D. Lapolice Collection (PH 070). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.