The state institution and the mental-health record: Fort Wayne State School to the Developmental Center

In Fort Wayne 1890 — closed 18 April 2007

The state hospital question, answered exactly: Fort Wayne never had a general state psychiatric hospital of the kind Indiana built at Indianapolis, Evansville, Logansport, and Richmond. What it had — for 117 years — was the state's institution for people with developmental disabilities, and that institution is a hospital record as much as a school record, whatever its name said. Indiana opened its School for Feeble Minded Youth at Knightstown in 1879 and relocated it to Fort Wayne in 1890, on East State Street; the Indiana Archives record the first Fort Wayne patient as an eleven-year-old boy from Ossian, in Wells County. The institution was renamed Fort Wayne State School in 1931 — one History Center catalog record gives the name as Fort Wayne State Hospital — its service area was cut to the northern half of Indiana in 1939, and its population peaked at 2,700 residents in 1964. It is also the center of the state's eugenics record: under Indiana's sterilization law the Fort Wayne institution supplied the majority of the state's sterilization patients, and the historians' counts differ — about 1,500 by Alexandra Minna Stern's 2005 count, about 1,800 of 2,424 by Paul's 1965 count — both carried here as they stand, as the Schools record also carries them. The move to a modern campus was decided in 1954; from 1960 the residents moved to Parker Place, 142 acres at Stellhorn and St. Joe roads with eighteen buildings. Renamed the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center in the 1980s, it became in 1986 the first Indiana developmental-disability facility to win accreditation. In all, 12,162 patients were admitted over the institution's life. It closed on 18 April 2007, when the last resident left; the original East State administration building had been demolished in 1982, and that site is now Bob Arnold Northside Park. Community mental-health care, as distinct from the state institution, belongs to the nonprofit centers: Park Center, Fort Wayne's community mental health center at 909 East State Boulevard, descends from the Fort Wayne Child Guidance Clinic and later the Mental Health Center at Fort Wayne — its own 2017 filing with the city gives its founding as 1953, while commercial directories give 1950 and other dates, and the conflict is carried rather than settled — and it operates inpatient psychiatric services alongside its outpatient programs, today as a Parkview affiliate. The Northeastern Center, the community mental health center for the counties northeast of Allen, keeps its inpatient hospital at Kendallville, outside this city's record.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration (IARA), Fort Wayne State School / Developmental Center records — the 1879 Knightstown opening, the 1890 relocation to Fort Wayne and its first patient, the 1931 renaming, the 1939 service-area change, the 1960 move to Parker Place, and the closure.
2. PBS, The Forgotten documentary record, and Asylum Projects — 12,162 patients admitted, the 2,700 peak population in 1964, the 1980s Developmental Center name, the 1986 first accreditation, and the last resident's departure on 18 April 2007.
3. Alexandra Minna Stern (2005) and Paul (1965), via the University of Vermont eugenics archive — the differing sterilization counts, about 1,500 and about 1,800 of 2,424.
4. Schools section of this history — the State School's course, the 1954 rebuild decision, and the East State site's afterlife as Bob Arnold Northside Park (administration building demolished 1982).
5. Park Center, Inc., City of Fort Wayne zoning filing (2017) — Park Center as a nonprofit community mental health center and inpatient hospital, "founded in 1953," originally the Fort Wayne Child Guidance Clinic and later the Mental Health Center at Fort Wayne, serving about 9,200 consumers through forty programs with more than 500 employees in 2016; commercial directories giving 1950 and other founding years are noted as the conflict.
6. Parkview Health, 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment — Park Center as a Parkview affiliate and private nonprofit community mental health center.