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 buried in the institution's own ground, at what is now the northwest corner of the Purdue University Fort Wayne entrance on St. Joe Road — the west side of the road, between Broyles Drive and Canterbury Boulevard, in Section 19 of St. Joseph Township. The cemetery was in use from July 1901 to May 1967. There is one large stone, dated 1901 to 1967, and the graves themselves were never individually marked; research into the ground indicates more than two hundred graves, possibly more. Local memory, preserved in the PBS documentary, calls the place God's Acre. The dead are not all nameless, because the school's annual reports once printed them: the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library holds the school's mortality lists, drawn from the reports to the Governor for November 1912 to June 1937, recovering 447 names — each with an age, a date, and a cause of death, and the era's "evaluation grade" recorded beside it. After 1937 the reports stopped listing the deaths, and the names of those who died at the school in its last seventy years rest in the admission registers and death records at the State Archives and the county, not on any stone. The Genealogy Center's compilation carries one further sober note: it is probable that some of the bodies counted toward the school cemetery were instead given to medical research. The work of giving the ground back its boundaries and its dead their names is unfinished. The IPFW student newspaper published a history of the cemetery in 2012; in 2020 the History Center hoped to work with university archaeology students to identify the cemetery's limits, a plan the pandemic interrupted; and in December 2021 the statue that had stood at the school — the "Contenders" — was rededicated at the cemetery, a ceremony carried in the PBS film. The stone archway at Northside Park and the column on East State stand for the first campus; on St. Joe Road, one dated stone stands for more than two hundred people.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, St. Joseph Township Cemeteries and the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth pages — the cemetery's location at the Purdue Fort Wayne St. Joe Road entrance (4900 St. Joe Road), its place in Section 19 of St. Joseph Township, and the rededication of the school's statue at the cemetery in December 2021 as shown in The Forgotten.
2. Allen County Public Library, Genealogy Center — Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth — Fort Wayne State School Mortality Lists (call number GC 977.202 F77fmy): 447 names with ages, dates, causes of death, and evaluation grades, from the annual reports of November 1912 to June 1937, after which the reports no longer listed deaths; the compilation's account of the cemetery — one large stone dated 1901 to 1967, graves never marked, burials also made in hometowns and other county cemeteries, and the probability that some bodies were given to medical research.
3. Find a Grave, Fort Wayne State Hospital Cemetery (also recorded as the Indiana Feeble Minded School Cemetery) — the site's dates, July 1901 to May 1967, and its position near the university campus.
4. PBS Fort Wayne, The Forgotten (2022), with the History Center and ACGSI accounts — the name God's Acre, the research indicating more than two hundred graves, and the History Center's 2020 hope of working with university archaeology students to define the cemetery's boundaries before the pandemic interrupted.