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 School for Feeble Minded Youth — and the state archives count it the second oldest mental-health facility in Indiana. In 1887 the legislature provided for a purpose-built school at Fort Wayne, and in 1890 the institution moved to a sixty-acre tract on East State Street — then the Hicksville State Road, out in the country northeast of the city. The Indiana Archives record the first Fort Wayne admission: an eleven-year-old boy from Ossian, in Wells County. About three hundred children were enrolled when the doors opened. The campus that rose on East State was a small town of its own — a Richardsonian Romanesque administration building (its cornerstone, dated 1898, is held by the History Center), cottages, a school building, an industrial arts building, a hospital, and a gymnasium — and children came to it from every county in Indiana. Its defining early superintendent was Alexander Johnson, an English-born social worker who had been secretary of the Indiana Board of State Charities and took charge of the school in 1893. Johnson was a national figure in the charity world, and his published writings — gathered late in life in Adventures in Social Welfare, printed at Fort Wayne in 1923 — mark the turn the institution took under him: from a school that expected to train children and send some home, toward his stated conviction that most of the people in his care, and especially women of childbearing age, should be segregated from society permanently. He survived a state senate investigation in 1896–97 and resigned in 1903, believing his methods had lost the board's support. His successor generation completed the turn: George S. Bliss, superintendent from 1912, was with Amos W. Butler of the Board of State Charities a leader of the movement, examined in the next entries, that made the Fort Wayne school the center of Indiana's eugenics program. In 1931 the legislature renamed the institution the Fort Wayne State School; that year its capacity stood at about 1,130 residents, with a waiting list of some two hundred names.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration (IARA), "Other Indiana Hospitals for the Mentally Ill and Developmentally Disabled" — the 1879 Knightstown opening, the school as Indiana's second oldest mental-health facility, the 1890 relocation to Fort Wayne, and the first Fort Wayne patient's age and home county.
2. Asylum Projects, Fort Wayne Developmental Center — the 1887 legislative act, the 1890 opening on East State Boulevard, and the opening enrollment of three hundred children.
3. The History Center, Fort Wayne — the campus buildings (administration building, cottages, school, industrial arts building, hospital, gymnasium) and the 1898 cornerstone of the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth, object 2007.16.3.
4. ACGSI, Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth page, with the school's Mortality Lists history (ACPL Genealogy Center) — the sixty-acre East State tract and its 1890 street names, and the 1931 figures of about 1,130 capacity and a waiting list of two hundred.
5. Indiana Magazine of History — "The Menace of the Feebleminded" (December 2001) and "The Rise and Fall of a Pedagogical Empire" (December 2000) — Alexander Johnson's appointment in 1893, his custodial doctrine and 1903 resignation, George S. Bliss's superintendency from 1912, and the school's place in the state charities system; Johnson's Adventures in Social Welfare (Fort Wayne, 1923).