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 trained in vocational arts divided strictly by gender: the young men learned farming, carpentry, bricklaying, shoemaking, painting, upholstering, and the making of mattresses and bricks; the young women learned the domestic arts — cleaning, cooking, canning, dressmaking, loom weaving, and laundry. The school's own 1916 annual report records that fifty-six percent of its residents were girls. By 1918 the population had swollen well past one thousand and included adults as well as children. The institution owned four farms, and the labor the reports called training was also the labor that ran the place: residents worked the farm that fed the school, the kitchens that cooked for more than a thousand people, and the laundry that washed for them. That double character — instruction on the record, and an unpaid workforce in fact — is how the annual reports and the later histories present it, and it is how it is printed here. Residents came from all over Indiana, most of them far from any family who could visit; the state, having taken them in as children on the promise of training, in practice kept a great many of them for life. It is against that reality — a lifetime lived inside one institution, at work the institution assigned — that the sterilization program of the next entry has to be read: the people it was done to had no way to leave, and no one outside the walls whose permission was asked.

Sources:

1. The History Center (Allen County Historical Society), Fort Wayne State Developmental Center account (2020) — the younger children's art, music, and gym classes and the gender-divided vocational training of the older residents.
2. ACGSI, Fort Wayne State Hospital Cemetery record, copying the school's published history — the men's trades (carpentry, agriculture, painting, upholstering, mattress-, shoe-, and brick-making) and the women's domestic arts (cleaning, cooking, canning, dressmaking, loom weaving, laundry).
3. Annual report of the school to the Governor (1916), as quoted in the Towns and Nature history of the institution — fifty-six percent of the residents girls; and Asylum Projects — the population well over one thousand by 1918, adults as well as children, and Parker Place as one of four farms the school owned.