The state institution in the city: the children's hospital that became a developmental center

1950 — closed 1999 (the closing also carried as 1998)

For forty-nine years, South Bend had a state institution after all: It did not begin as a mental institution. The state established the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in South Bend in 1950, in the polio years, to care for children the disease had crippled; directories place it at 1234 North Notre Dame Avenue. Its first chapter belongs to the epidemics record, but one fact of it belongs here, because the institution that stood on the ground carried it forward: the hospital's nursing staff of 1950 included Helen Pope, who worked to desegregate the facility — the episode stands whole in this history's Black History record, and stands here as the building's inheritance. As the vaccine emptied the polio wards, the legislature changed the hospital's charge: the General Assembly of 1961 converted it into a unit for the care of children the statutes of the day called mentally retarded — the federal directory of state residential facilities dates the developmental center's opening to July 1961 and carries it under the name Northern Indiana State Hospital and Developmental Disabilities Center — and it settled into the role the State Archives states: care of developmentally disabled children drawn from the northern half of Indiana.

By its closure it had admitted 16,974 patients. The end came with the state's turn away from its developmental institutions, and its documentation is candid about the cause: the Arc of Indiana's history records that a 1997 Indianapolis television series profiling resident abuse by staff at the New Castle center began the movement to close the state institutions — New Castle in 1998, the Northern Indiana center among them, Muscatatuck in 2005, and Fort Wayne last, in 2007. The closing year of the South Bend center prints as the sources give it, unsettled between them: the State Archives dates the facility 1950–1999 and holds its admission register and microfilmed records, catalogued as spanning 1943–1999 — seven years before the Archives' own establishment date, a variance the record leaves open; the Arc's timeline and the obituary of the center's longtime director of nursing, who served from 1973, both date the closing to 1998.

What followed the residents was studied rather than assumed: a state quality-tracking project followed the people who moved from the New Castle and Northern Indiana centers into community placements, and its 2000 report — as later summarized in federal court filings — found statistically significant gains in skills a year after the move, with professionals and families judging the moved residents better off in their new homes. No patient is named in this entry, as in this section throughout; the center's dead and discharged alike rest in records the Archives holds under the state's confidentiality rules. The ground's later course is not documented in the sources reached, and it is not supplied here.

Sources:

1. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, "Other Indiana Hospitals for the Mentally Ill and Developmentally Disabled" — the Northern Indiana State Developmental Center, South Bend (1950–1999): established 1950 as the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital for children with polio; the 1961 General Assembly's conversion of it to a unit for mentally retarded children (the era's words, as the Archives gives them); its later care of developmentally disabled children in the northern half of Indiana; 16,974 patients admitted by its closure; and its admission register and microfilmed patient records at the State Archives.
2. Indiana Historical Society, State Hospitals, Schools, and Homes collection guide — the State Archives' holdings for the South Bend center catalogued as spanning 1943–1999, carried beside the Archives' 1950 establishment date as the record gives both.
3. Directory of State-Operated Residential Facilities Serving Mentally Retarded People in 1979, Developmental Disabilities Project, University of Minnesota (1979) — the "Northern Indiana State Hospital & Developmental Disabilities Center" at South Bend, its opening as such dated July 1961. Directory listings place the center at 1234 North Notre Dame Avenue, South Bend.
4. Helen Pope papers, Civil Rights Heritage Center, Indiana University South Bend Archives (finding aid) — Pope's service as a polio nurse at the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in 1950 and her work to desegregate the facility, cross-referenced to this history's Black History record.
5. The Arc of Indiana, history highlights (The Arc News in Indiana, Fall 2021) — the 1997 WISH-TV series on New Castle and the closure movement it began, listing the Northern Indiana Development Center's closure at 1998; obituary of the center's director of nursing (McGann Hay, 2024) — her service at the center from 1973 "until it was closed in 1998"; the two 1998 datings carried against the Archives' 1999.
6. Conroy and Seiders, Outcomes of Community Placement at One Year for the People Who Moved from New Castle and Northern Indiana State Developmental Centers, Report No. 6, Indiana Community Placement Quality Tracking Project (2000), as summarized in the appellants' brief in Ricci v. Patrick County (7th Cir. 2008) — the measured gains and the families' and professionals' judgment a year after placement.