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Mental Health Institutions · The state school, the county asylum, and the long road back to the community
For most of Fort Wayne's history, a resident who fell mentally ill or was born with a developmental disability had three possible destinations, and none of them was a psychiatric hospital in this city — Fort Wayne never had a general state hospital for the insane of the kind Indiana built at Indianapolis, Evansville, Logansport, and Richmond. What it had instead was an insane ward behind the county poor farm, a handful of small private sanitaria, and, from 1890, one of the largest institutions in Indiana: the state school for children the era called "feeble-minded," which stood on East State Street and later at Parker Place for a hundred and seventeen years. Twelve thousand one hundred and sixty-two people were admitted to that school across its life. They were taught, they were put to work, some were sterilized under the nation's first eugenics law, and those who died unclaimed were buried in a cemetery whose graves were never marked. This section is their record, and the record of the institutions that held them — told from the documents, in the plainest terms the documents allow.
The county asylum and its insane ward
1853 — the Bluffton Road farm closed 1925
Before any hospital, there was the poor farm: Allen County established its poor farm in June 1853, buying land in Section 29 of Wayne Township and contracting to build a house for $750; George L. Parker was hired that December to…
The state school comes to Fort Wayne
1879 — renamed Fort Wayne State School 1931
An institution for children, built at the edge of town: Indiana opened its institution for children with developmental disabilities at Knightstown in 1879 — first called the Asylum for Feeble Minded Children, then the Indiana…
Daily life and labor at the school
1890 — 1960
Taught in the morning, worked the rest of the day: The documented rhythm of the Fort Wayne school was the rhythm of its era's institutions. The youngest children took classes in art, music, and gymnastics. Older residents were…
Eugenics: the first law in the nation, and Fort Wayne at its center
1907 — repealed 1974
What Indiana did first, it did most of all at Fort Wayne: Indiana's eugenics program began around the Fort Wayne school even before there was a statute. The state had passed one of the nation's first restrictive marriage laws in…
Parker Place: the modern campus, the long decline, and the closure
1954 — closed 18 April 2007
A new campus, and then the end of the institution itself: In 1939 the school's service area had already been cut to the northern half of Indiana, its mission widened to people of all ages with developmental disabilities. By the…
The burial ground: God's Acre
1901 — 1967
One stone, and the names it does not carry: Not everyone who died at the state school went home. Some residents were buried by their families in their hometowns or in other Allen County cemeteries; those who had no one were…
The private sanitaria of the directory era
1900 — 1940
Water cures and a doctor's sanitarium — but no private asylum: Between the county ward and the state school stood a small private layer, visible in the city directories. The Polk directory of 1900 lists, under baths, the Kneipp…
Park Center: the child guidance clinic becomes a mental health center
Clinic roots 1947 — the mental health center from 1967
Care moves out of the institution and into the neighborhood: Community mental-health care in Fort Wayne begins with children. Park Center's own published history traces its start to the Fort Wayne Child Guidance Clinic "as early…
The reckoning: marker, regret, and the names restored
2007 — 2022
The state says it, a century later: Indiana's formal acknowledgment of its eugenics program came in 2007, the centennial of the law — not later, and it is dated here exactly. On 12 April 2007 the Indiana Historical Bureau…
The modern layer: care in the community
1963 — today
What replaced the institutions: The system that stands where the institutions stood is deliberately un-institutional. For people with developmental disabilities, the Developmental Center's 2007 closure completed a forty-year…
