The Fort Wayne State School

1890 – 2007

Founded: Indiana's institution for children with disabilities was created at Knightstown in 1879; the legislature voted a Fort Wayne building in 1887, and the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth — the period's name, kept here as the record's name — opened in Fort Wayne in 1890 on East State Boulevard, admitting about 300 children.

Course: It was a school in fact as well as in name: residents were taught and trained on a campus that grew into one of the city's largest institutions. It was renamed Fort Wayne State School in 1931 (one History Center catalog record gives the 1931 name as Fort Wayne State Hospital). The school is also part of a darker record: under Indiana's eugenics law, Fort Wayne residents made up the majority of the state's sterilization patients — historians' counts differ, between roughly 1,500 and 1,800 of the state's approximately 2,400 sterilizations (Paul, 1965; Stern, 2005). Overcrowding drove the 1954 decision to rebuild at Parker Place Farm, near Stellhorn and St. Joe Roads; the move began in 1960 and the population passed 2,500. Renamed in its later years the Fort Wayne Developmental Center, it became in 1986 the first Indiana facility of its kind accredited by the Accreditation Council on Services for People with Developmental Disabilities.

Fate: The center closed in 2007 — the last resident left April 18, 2007 — after 12,162 admissions across its life. The original East State building had been demolished in 1982; its site is now North Side Park. The vacated campus land was divided in 2007: Ivy Tech took the property for its North Campus expansion and IPFW received 40 acres.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration — Fort Wayne Developmental Center record (Knightstown 1879; Fort Wayne 1890; 12,162 admissions; closed 2007).
2. Asylum Projects — Fort Wayne Developmental Center (construction 1887; opened 1890; Parker Place Farm move; ACCD accreditation, 1986).
3. The History Center, cornerstone record (1931 renaming variant); ACGSI (last resident, Apr. 18, 2007; East State building demolished 1982).
4. Paul (1965) and Stern (2005), sterilization counts, via the University of Vermont eugenics survey.