Historically, the mentally ill in the United States have largely been viewed as a social and economic issue more than a medical problem.
The solution was basically the same, house them together, separate from everyone else to be forgotten.
They were hidden away from society in vast state run institutions.
In 1890, Indiana opened a brand new facility for all of the children in the state with mental disabilities.
It was located on the northeast side of the city of Fort Wayne.
It was called the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth.
In those days, there were very few people that knew anything about mental retardation.
Nobody knew anything about the severely and profoundly retarded dually diagnosed with mentally handicaps and severe behavior problems and physical problems.
You have no rights.
You're locked away.
Yes.
You're fed and clothed.
But you don't get your basic needs met.
You know, it's deplorable.
I mean, some people were here, what, 40, 50 years like this is not a way to live.
This is the story of that forgotten place from the archaic days of the past, through the medical and behavioral progress that was gained through the building of a new complex to the eventual closure.
What I saw with the lower functioning, there was as much progress in that part of our world as there was in the space program from where we were to where it went.
This is a history of the state developmental institutions in Fort Wayne.
The following program is brought to you in part by AWS foundation building an inclusive Northeast Indiana, where those with disabilities have the opportunity to reach their full potential.
And by viewers like you.
Thank you.
Lunatics Hither!
Fort Wayne is a desirable place for you to live in.
This 1873 column in the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette expressed the city's desire to have the new asylum built in Fort Wayne, sending the mayor to Indianapolis to campaign on the city's behalf.
It was noted that Fort Wayne had missed out on the Northern Penitentiary that went to Michigan City and the Howe Sewing Machine Works that went to Peru.
Fort Wayne would not miss out this time.
And besides, as the Gazette so humbly pointed out in the first place, it can be truthfully said that Fort Wayne is decidedly the most healthy city in the state.
People seem to be healthier, not as sickly, and we didn't have some of the ills that the big city of Indianapolis had.
Fort Wayne was also the commercial center of northern Indiana, with four railroad companies bringing trains to the city from eight different directions.
Other reasons were given why legislatures should choose the Summit City, including the fact that Fort Wayne averaged a lower mortality rate than any other city in the state.
To address those children that were considered unfortunate in 1879, the Indiana state legislature appropriate $2,000 for a feeble minded asylum at the existing soldiers and Sailors Orphans home in Knighstown.
The south wing of the three story building was to be turned into the asylum for feeble minded children.
The lawmakers explained their intentions.
The purpose of the institution are to support, train and instruct feeble minded children.
The term feeble minded to include idiotic epileptic and paralytic children, between the ages of six and 18.
With roughly 1,200 potential patrons in Indiana at the time, it was known that this asylum edition was just an initial move.
A much larger and permanent facility would have to be built somewhere.
On February 18th, 1887, the Indiana General Assembly approved a bill establishing the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth and the location Fort Wayne.
A board of trustees was created, which was to be nonpartisan, with one woman as a member.
The scope of eligibility was enlarged as well.
Previously, only those that could be improved were admitted.
Now there were two classes, the custodial that would be cared for and the industrial which would be taught a trade.
The board was to take special provisions so that the low grade youths would not associate with the brighter and more improved grades.
The cost of the institution was limited to $50,000.
That same General Assembly passed another bill that established a soldiers and sailors monument to be built at the circle in the center of Indianapolis.
That endeavor was given a budget of $250,000.
The new board of Trustees had to act quickly.
In April, they appointed Fort Wayne Architects Wing and Mahurin to prepare designs for the new school.
It was an easy choice as they sought no competition.
55 acres of land, about one and a half miles north of downtown, was purchased for $10,000 as the site for the new school.
On November 1st, 1887, John G. Blake was elected first superintendent of the newly formed Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth.
Wing and Mahurin presented their designs to the trustees and they were grand.
The central administration building was flanked by wings to house the youths.
One side for the boys.
The other for girls.
The buildings would be a source of pride for the city.
The state had based their occupancy on the Knightstown youths, of which there were 60.
But John Blake knew that the 1880 Census had found that some 1,800 Indiana children had been deemed feeble minded and instructed Wing and Mahurin to design a facility on a much larger scale to house up to 400.
The trustees decided to move ahead with construction of the Wing and Mahurin building and go back to the General Assembly and request additional funds to cover the expansion and additional buildings.
The ranks in the temporary asylum in Richmond had already grown to over 230.
In the spring of 1888, notices were published seeking proposals for the construction of the new facility in Fort Wayne, noting that the buildings had to be enclosed by January 1889.
By June, William Moellering had won the contract with the lowest bid and work commenced shortly thereafter.
Most of the work was being done on good faith and the trustees were racking up debt, getting this new institution literally off the ground.
In November, Blake presented the governor the request for the larger facility and additional funding totaling $193,300.
The General Assembly debated this amount and were less than pleased that Blake and his trustees had decided on their own to expand the plans and to move forward with construction, all without asking for approval.
Blake went to Indianapolis and personally appealed to members of both the House and the Senate, stating that the new Fort Wayne School would be a model for all others in the U.S.. His work paid off, and in March of 1889, the legislature appropriated $179,000 enough to finish the construction.
Blake was now aiming for June of 1890 to have the children in Richmond moved to Fort Wayne.
Their numbers had grown to 269, with a waiting list of over 100.
Just before Thanksgiving, the last of over 3 million bricks for the Indiana School for feeble minded Youth was placed.
The workmen rightly celebrated the completion of this mammoth undertaking, but apparently indulged too freely in stimulants.
One of the hilarious workmen weakened a scaffolding and two other workers fell several stories to the ground.
They were bruised but escaped serious injury.
In January of 1890, a reporter for the Indianapolis News visited the building site.
He said the imposing building fronts the South commanding a fine view of the town a mile and a half distant.
Provisions have been made for electric lighting and heating by natural gas.
On July 8th, 1890, a train carrying over 300 children arrived at Fort Wayne from the temporary asylum in Richmond.
A large crowd greeted them at the Pennsylvania depot and Superintendent Blake lined them up and walked them to their new home.
Mrs. Orr, the matron of the institution had supper waiting for them.
The Fort Wayne Sentinel noted that the institution is a palace compared with the inconveniences that were endured at Richmond.
The Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth had officially begun its duties.
The first several weeks were filled with the chaos of moving hundreds of children all at once into a new and unfamiliar home.
The public's interest also led to troubles.
As one nice Sunday evening led to a great crowd that thronged the grounds and ran all over the front yard, injuring the flowers and annoying the inmates.
A few days later, a Fort Wayne Sentinel reporter boarded a streetcar at the foot of Calhoun Street for a trip to the school.
A pleasant ride of an hour brought me to the institution.
The reporter noted that there were about 50 staff for the 300 youths.
The inmates are not insane and many of them are capable of a considerable degree of instruction which the Corps of Teachers import with uniform kindness without any corporal punishment.
The building is an honor to the state of Indiana and reflects credit upon those who have reared it.
About the same time, several members of the State Board came to visit the new institution.
Their feelings were a bit different.
Alexander Johnson, secretary of the Board of Charities, said the location was not good, no shade and an insufficient supply of water, and that the plot was just too small.
There ought to have been 200 or 300 acres of ground in the original purchase, for it is only a matter of time until more will be necessary.
Life at the school settled into routines.
Academic classes included kindergarten, primary and advanced studies, sense training, physical education, a boys band and a drum corps.
The industrial department taught carpentry, gardening, tailoring, woodworking, painting, upholstery and table waiting.
All of the stockings, socks, mittens and uniforms would be made on site.
A contingent of teachers and students had arrived before the others and made new mattresses for all the beds.
Shoemaking would put hundreds of pairs of shoes on those at the school with mending done on site as well.
Older and more capable children would work in the laundry or engine room or do housework.
More children from around the state came in regularly.
A year after opening, construction began on a separate school building, an industrial building and a root cellar.
As predicted, more room and land was needed.
By the spring of 1893, Blake was noted as acting peculiar and rumors started to fly.
In April, Blake broke down, resigned his position and admitted to abusing some of the students.
He fled Fort Wayne on the midnight train to Chicago.
His physician said the true cause of Mr. Blake's downfall was whiskey.
Alexander Johnson was named the new superintendent.
When it had opened, he had criticized the school for not having enough land.
He wasted no time and leased 160 acres of farmland, putting 20 boys and 30 cows on the property.
He figured they could save about $3,000 a year on milk as the new school now had 454 mouths to feed.
By the following year, farmland about a mile and a half northeast of the school along what is now St Joe Road was being purchased.
This was the beginning of what was called Oak Park Colony.
Many of the older boys were moved from the school to live on the farm and other patients were brought in to work the land as well.
Over the next several years, other farms were purchased, including Oaklawn and Parker Place farms totaling over 500 acres.
Where the college is today, all that land, all the way over to the Saint Joe River, all that was the state farm.
And it was a working farm.
And population at the state school would work there.
Farming was a significant part of the institution as it allowed the boys to learn real skills, apply those skills and have successes while being productive, which in turn gave the school some self-sufficiency.
The farms had cattle, hogs, chickens and large fields with a wide array of vegetables and fruit trees.
The work lowered food costs and enabled everyone at the school to have better nutrition.
Higher functioning boys were usually assigned to live on the farms, while the lower functioning would be brought in to help when needed.
Another, more grim use of the farm land was that of a cemetery.
Every year several children would perish by causes such as convulsions, pneumonia or tuberculosis.
Many were buried in their hometown, but some were buried in a small plot on the west side of Saint Joe Road, known then as God's Acre.
There were minimal markers, if at all, and only a few of those remain.
The farms also helped to segregate the residents, although all of the patients were considered defective or unfortunate by society, within the institution, they were separated by sex and by functioning levels.
The lowest level with a mental age of two or younger were idiots, while those with a capacity of up to a seven year old were labeled as imbeciles.
The higher functioning, but not quite normal, were termed morons.
These were clinical terms at the time used for the classification of different levels of intelligence for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Within the institution, the different levels of abilities determined what you did and where you lived.
In 1897, the trustees approved the purchase of some old brick making equipment, which was moved to the Oak Park farm.
A report stated that an average of nine of our stoutest, although not our smartest boys working under one hired foremen made during the season 250,000 excellent well burned bricks.
In those early years, they made every brick that was used in the construction of additional dormitories and other buildings at the school.
Between that and the farming, which provided over $6,000 worth of food to the school in 1898, significant state money was being saved by the labor of the patients.
While the boys did the farming and the brickwork, the girls were taught cooking, canning, house cleaning, knitting, crocheting, dressmaking, embroidery, loom weaving and laundry.
These industries provided needed goods and services, created more self-sufficiency and enabled the residents to learn useful skills that gave them a sense of pride and accomplishment.
The younger and more able children took classes in the new school building, and the music programs expanded with more groups and bands.
A new women's cottage was constructed and named after the only woman on the board of trustees, Mrs. J.B. Harper.
The traffic out front became quite busy with people, freight and supplies coming in daily.
The street had been called Griswold after the letter carrier that served the street, but because it was a state institution and most people in Fort Wayne referred to it simply as the state school, the street name was changed to State Street.
In 1904 Albert Carroll became the new superintendent of the State School.
The population was now at 1,035, pushing the need for more farmland, more buildings, more rooms and more maintenance.
The institution was becoming a campus with more dormitory cottage buildings like Harpers Lodge being built with bricks made at the farm.
Carroll asked for a new and larger hospital and funds to convert the old hospital into a girls cottage.
Over the years, the city had been creeping north with homes ever closer to the school.
An iron fence was erected on the north and east side of the school grounds.
In August of 1912, Albert Carroll died of pneumonia at the state school.
He was 42.
Dr. George Bliss was hired to replace him.
The pace of expansion, building and new residents continued.
Several new buildings were added to the campus on State Street.
A new octagonal framed dairy barn and a piggery for 250 hogs was constructed.
The black Hawk farm of 340 acres, about two miles east of the Oak Park and Parker Place Farms, was purchased at a cost of $40,000.
In 1924, James Jackson was named the new superintendent of the School for Feeble Minded Youth.
He was formerly the manager of the trucks on the farms, and he replaced Dr. Byron Biggs, a nationally known psychopathic expert.
Jim Jackson was the brother of the newly elected governor, Ed Jackson.
His appointment was contested from the beginning.
He fired the institution's social worker, the psychologist and several others.
He had the state purchase a Cadillac for him.
His brother's administration was known for corruption and legal troubles.
And soon after, the governor's term ended, Jim Jackson was replaced by Charles McGonagle.
By June of 1931, the population at the school was at 1,721, with 200 people on the waiting list.
The school's official capacity at that point was 1,130.
By now, the campus encompassed almost all of the 55 acres shown here with a Sanborn fire insurance map.
The industrial building housed woodworking, shoemaking and a mattress shop with a warehouse to store the surplus mattresses next door.
There were several support buildings close by; the power plant, with its towering smokestack, the root cellar and the laundry.
Just west of the administration building was the school, one of the first separate buildings constructed.
East of the administration building was another early building, the former Fever Hospital.
It was built to handle a measles outbreak.
It had been converted into a girl's home.
On the southeast corner of the property, the boy's cottage was built, joined later by another boys cottage that was called Biggs.
The gym was designed around a basketball court with a ring of bleachers and large windows on both sides.
It was also used as an auditorium with a stage for performances.
Another early building was Sunset Cottage, north of the main building.
It was expanded with a fourth wing on the back to increase occupancy.
Between Sunset and the Administration Building was a greenhouse, a lumber and paint storage building and horse stalls.
There was also a two story stable with an earthen ramp to the second story.
The hospital was on the north edge of the property and was originally built in 1914 with two wings.
The dormitory on the West Side was added on later.
Next to the hospital was Carroll Cottage, which housed girls.
What started out as the custodial cottage became the wing that joined the two buildings, which together were called Harper Lodge.
Many of the cottages had exterior slides as fire escapes.
These were easier and faster than a ladder for those with mental and physical disabilities.
In 1931, the Indiana General Assembly changed the institution's name to simply the Fort Wayne State School.
It was felt that the old name was cumbersome and awkward.
Other changes were brewing.
The public's appetite for social obligations were being influenced by many factors, but one ideological belief soon rose above the others.
In 1907, the General Assembly of Indiana passed, among other things, a bill to make Lincoln's birthday a legal holiday and a bill providing for involuntary sterilization of habitual criminals and idiots in state institutions in order to stop the propagation of their kind.
It was the world's first eugenic sterilization law.
In 1909 a new governor, Thomas Marshall, soon put a stop to the process by threatening the funding of institutions that use the law.
The law was eventually struck down in 1921 by the Indiana Supreme Court, but shortly thereafter, the legislature succeeded in passing a second law in 1927, removing serious criminals and confining it to just the insane, feebleminded or epileptic as before it applied only to those housed within state institutions.
A letter to the editor of the News Sentinel on February 13, 1931, put it quite bluntly, The feeble minded, as a rule, come from the homes of the poor, and yet they present one of the serious problems of the state.
When at large they reproduce and multiply more rapidly than normal individuals.
They are found in our children's homes, our county infirmaries in our jails and in our prisons.
And unless the public is aroused and some session of the General Assembly, has the courage to meet the problem in a scientific and understanding manner.
These type of individuals will present an ever increasing burden on society.
That letter was written by Charles McGonagale superintendent of the Fort Wayne State School.
Another editorial that year in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel reflects much of the public sentiment.
The only positive means of reducing feeble mindedness are sterilization and segregation.
The former involves a moral argument with a large percentage of the citizens of Indiana.
The second method is unanimously agreed upon as being effective.
While there are a considerable number who will argue that sterilization is the wrong step, there are none who will deny that segregation of the feeble minded in institutions makes impossible their marriage and reproduction of their own kind.
What is the bearing of the laws of heredity upon human affairs?
Eugenics provides the answer so far as this is known.
Eugenics seeks to apply the known laws of heredity so as to prevent the degeneration of the race and improve its inborn qualities.
In institutions such as this all over the country, mental defectives are cared for.
These are children who are helpless in every way and need constant attention.
Once they have been born, defectives are happier and more useful in these institutions than when at large.
But it would have been better by far for them and for the rest of the community if they had never been born.
The overcrowding at state institutions led to a push to rapidly parole older patients to make room for younger ones.
The Fort Wayne State School made sterilization a prerequisite for release, a policy that began in 1932.
For the next 25 years, an average of 57 patients were sterilized each year at the Fort Wayne State School.
It was almost a 50/50 split of men and women.
The average age was 24, although the largest single age group was 16 year olds.
I interviewed a man whose name was Mel, who was brought here at the age of seven to the state school.
And he said, looking back, he knows his dad was an alcoholic.
And he said, I think my mother probably had some form of depression or some mental illness and she just couldn't cope.
And the mother called one day the state and apparently said, we can't take care of this son.
So he remembers one Sunday, a big black car pulling up in front of their house in Indianapolis and there was a man and a woman and he said they were dressed, you know, very, very formally.
And he said, I'd never been out of Indianapolis, never left the city.
And his mother handed him a little suitcase and said, you're going with these people.
That's all she said, you're going.
He got in the car and he remembers barely being able to see out the window and didn't say anything to him.
But he remembers corn fields and they're driving north and they bring him to the state school and he's taken in and he remembers they stripped him of his clothes.
They deloused him.
And he can remember scrubbing floors at State Street with a toothbrush.
But he learned to cook.
He enjoyed cooking, and so they used him in the kitchen.
And he said, I learned to work.
He also knew, as he saw some of the residents here, that he was he knew he was high functioning.
You know, he could read and figure out recipes in the in the kitchen.
And so he he said, I don't want to be here any more.
So he told them, I want to leave.
And they said, well, Mel, we'll let you go if you agree to be sterilized.
And he was 16 years old and he agreed because he said that was my ticket, it was my only ticket out.
So that form of eugenics was practiced a lot, far more than, in fact, the records of the state schools show that there were some years that after 1920, 1930, that it just it just went up higher and higher.
Indiana's 1927 sterilization law, which was amended several times over the years but remained the principal legal foundation for forced sterilization in state institutions was not repealed until 1974.
Over that 47 year time span, over 2,000 sterilizations were performed in Indiana.
The majority took place at the Fort Wayne State School.
The election of 1932 brought a new governor and a new superintendent, Dr. W.F.
Dunham.
He continued the near-constant campaign for additional funds to build a larger school, to add an infirmary to the hospital, to provide more facilities for industrial and vocational training and for recreation.
Dunham championed educating children to their maximum ability, even though the mental age of residents ranged from about 1 to 12.
Under Dunham, the state schools occupational department flourished.
The enhanced skills included basket weaving, cabinet making, sewing and shoemaking.
In 1936 alone, residents working in the industrial department made over 2,000 pairs of shoes, with close to 2,000 residents.
The Fort Wayne State School was a very crowded and busy place.
The school had a large music program which consisted of both a boys band and a girls band, as well as the boys and girls choirs.
Concerts were held in the gym and the public were invited to come and watch.
The cottage system meant not just separating the girls from the boys, but placing patients with those that were of the same level of mental abilities.
For the large percentage of people with profound mental disabilities, life at the state school was very different.
Many of them could not even perform the most basic of tasks of feeding themselves, dressing themselves, or going to the bathroom on their own.
We had human beings who had been in most instances, maybe every instance, had been organically damaged in some way, and because of that they had learning handicaps.
In those days, there were very few people that knew anything about mental retardation.
Nobody knew anything about the severely and profoundly retarded, dually diagnosed with mentally handicaps and severe behavioral problems and physical problems.
They had generally divided the population or the residents up into three groups.
Educable, the highest functioning, trainable, who would be the next highest functioning, and then non-trainable, which would be roughly the bottom half of the functioning.
Your lower level cognitive, maybe non toilet trained, nonverbal, you have to feed them with the spoon, you had to change them, was your low.
Your medium?
They could pretty much bathe themselves, take care of themselves, and then your higher level very independent, they could probably work or even write.
For the person that we couldn't educate or train, they had to have total care, which if it meant that they couldn't feed their self, we fed them and if they had to be changed or toliet trained or whatever we done it.
Those with debilitating physical handicaps were confined to their beds for the majority of the day.
Others struggled with behavioral problems and often had to be restrained using shackles and straitjackets due to violent outbursts and fits.
These people, many of them, I mean, they had all reasons for being there, but behavior usually was the biggest problem.
And if they had neurological damage to especially the frontal lobe, which controls your emotions and they got angry.
I mean, they would self-abuse bang their heads, they would destroy anything they got their hands on and fight.
Staff In those days, their only option was to some way subdue them and put them in a side room.
Um, left them there for till they could settle down and come out.
Well, we had one patient, she was a huge girl, that she could even, strong enough to almost knock the door off of a side room.
And we had all kinds of problems with her.
And it finally got so bad that she had to be transferred to another facility because we could not handle her.
She got to the place that she couldn't be out in the day room or in the dormitories with the other individuals, which was sad.
Overcrowding was still an issue and in 1940 it was decided that the Fort Wayne State School would now only take patients from the north half of the state.
The southern part of the state would be addressed by the Muscatatuck colony formerly the Indiana farm colony for feeble minded near North Vernon, Indiana.
But that did little to reduce the numbers currently at the facility and the Second World War made things even more difficult, minimal funding was given to state institutions, and building supplies were scarce.
Some residents with sleep difficulties had crib like beds with sides, but due to overcrowding in some cases, two residents shared a bed at night.
Day rooms where residents were to enjoy leisure time, had chairs lined up tightly in rows to accommodate 50 or more people in a space designed for 20.
When I got here, they were overcapacity.
I mean, when you looked at the dormitories, they were bed to bed.
I think that most of the people just sat in those day rooms and I don't know, I don't know, it was not enriching I can tell you that.
People frequently referred to them as warehouses, and I think that's the best description where you put the inventory and it sits there till it expires.
You have no rights.
You're locked away.
Yes, you're fed and clothed, but you don't get your basic needs met.
You know, you're housed, its deplorable.
Who would want this.
I mean, some people were here, what, 40, 50 years?
It's like this is not a way to live.
Individuals didn't have anything meaningful to do for themselves.
They were just part of a large mass of people usually in a building.
Some of our individuals was in like carts, just a cart with four wheels on it.
And they laid in there all the time and they had to be turned a lot.
We had individuals like that not in a wheelchair in carts.
So it was a crowded place that was not at all a place we should have put people.
Additionally, the institution was greatly understaffed.
They were operating at a constant shortage of nearly 50 employees, especially for direct care attendants.
At one time, there was one nurse for the entire campus on State Street, and then later they had two.
And then they went to four.
So, you know, the staffing was awful really in terms of ratios.
1 to 30, uh, not much training.
You just literally got them together and hope that you could keep them under control.
And we had to feed them.
A lot of them we had to feed.
Sometimes you had to feed two individuals at once.
That's how short you was of staff, because this one is not going to wait until you feed that one and there grabbing and you got to bring them all down to the dining room because who's going to keep them back on the division if you leave them up there?
So sometime you have enough people that is supposed to come to work, but they don't for whatever reason, then you have to, you know, have to do what you need to do to take care of everybody in some fashion.
There was a time when people would work straight through 24 hours a day and Indianapolis picked up on that and said, there's no way somebody can provide services and not sleep.
So they demanded that they could only work two shifts and had to be off a shift.
And that put some people in a bind.
When you're ready to go home and there's nobody to replace you, and you've already worked your two shifts and you certainly weren't going to walk off and leave them unattended.
Extreme overcrowding, a serious shortage of help of all kinds buildings which are fire hazards.
That is the situation at the state maintained institution for the feeble minded here, said the News Sentinel on July 19, 1944.
The story was describing what Governor Henry R. Stricker and members of the State Budget Committee saw when touring the Fort Wayne State School.
Then Superintendent Luther T. Hurley reported the number of patients at the state school that July was 1,918 but the school had space for only 1,500.
Even with sterilization, the numbers paroled each year were outpaced by the number admitted.
He said Our baby was mongoloid.
The doctor called it Down's Syndrome.
Eyes slanted, brain damaged or not developed, something like that.
They said, put it away.
Forget it.
Go home and enjoy your normal children.
Chances are any other children you may have will be normal to.
Chalk this one up to an accident, freak.
In the 1950s, down's syndrome was seen as a horrible sentence, I guess you'd call it.
Doctors, when presented with a Down's infant, many would just tell the parents, now, the best thing for you to do is to admit this child to the institution.
And some of them would say, and don't even tell your other children about this child.
And they were advised not to have any further contact for their own emotional safety and you know, that's just sad because so many down's people are so friendly and outgoing and social and they really are kind of a joy to have around.
The child could have been managed at home, but they were told the parents place your child in the institution.
In fact, I interviewed more than one parent who said their family doctors said don't tell the siblings that they that the brother or sister lived.
Just say their sibling died.
They knew mom was pregnant.
Mom went away, had the baby.
The baby was born with a developmental disability, you know, from birth.
And they were told, just forget about it.
And you know, that was not terribly uncommon.
But that was, I think, the humane advice, people would be happier with their own was a common phrase that people used.
Now the folks that raised their children, it was obviously better that they were with family, but it was typically still a very sheltered life.
Kids did not go to school.
There was no universal special Ed before it became mandated.
So kids just stayed home all day, often, you know, confined to their room.
So again, was probably better than living in an institution, but it was certainly not an inclusive life.
While farming continued to be an integral part of the state school, it was becoming more difficult to maintain the structures and machines that replaced the work of many of the boys.
There were approximately 900 acres of farmland being used to raise and supply food to the more than 2,000 residents of the institution.
Large dormitories were located on the grounds of Oak Park Farm that housed many of the older boys who lived and worked there.
Also located on Oak Park Farm was a white two story house that was used as a residence for state school employees.
In 1956, Jerome Henry, senior of Fort Wayne, was hired as a social worker at the school.
His eldest son, Jerome Henry Jr, recalls his family living in the house on the grounds of Oak Park Farm.
My dad was Jerome F Henry Senior and he's born here in Fort Wayne and went to Central Catholic high school, went in the Navy and World War Two.
Came back and went to school on the GI Bill and became a psychiatric social worker, graduated from IU and became a social worker at the Fort Wayne, Indiana State School.
My mother maiden name was Applegate, and she married my dad, I think 1949, and I was born in 1950.
My dad became a what I would say a pretty legendary social worker in this community.
He had a soft spot in his heart for the poor and underserved.
And the state school at the time gave him a perfect outlet to fulfill that vocation.
At that point, we were starting to have a lot of kids.
And in those days, if you work for the state and certain jobs, you got a housing allowance and you got a transportation allowance, and most importantly, you got a food allowance.
So my dad figured out with all these kids that working for the state is a pretty good gig if you got the right job cause you got, in essence, free food and, then housing was a big deal.
We had quite a few kids in a small house on Fifth Street, and so the state offered my dad the state farm house, which was on Saint Joe Road 4761 Saint Joe Road.
And, and we lived there.
The farmhands would come across the street and they were residents, of course, of what we called the state school then.
But a little bit of a slowness maybe, or physical or mental, but we would talk to them.
They were farmhands.
They all had the coveralls on and came to work every day.
And they came right across right up our driveway to get to the farm, which was in the back.
But that was actually a pretty major working farm.
And in the early sixties, there was a lot of brick buildings there.
You know, the bypass, was it was just getting built there.
The bypass stopped at the Coliseum.
So that was all that new highway was all being built.
And the state owned all that property.
The Henry family enjoyed living in their simple two story home, surrounded by acres of farmland.
The house and food allowance that was offered by the state as additional compensation to Jerome's modest salary was essential in helping the Henrys provide for their large and ever growing family.
Unfortunately, living on the state school farm also had its downsides.
The Henry House sat right next to God's Acre, the institution's burial ground.
Right in front of our house was a small cemetery and residents would die at state school, and didn't have any family didn't have a record, and so they would bring they had wood coffins, they would bring them across the street, horse drawn wagon, and they would bury them in this little, little cemetery, which is still there to this day.
No service, I mean, just so and so died.
Well, my mom found out about it, and she said well, we're not doing that anymore.
She says, I want to know when somebody dies and we're going to have a service for them.
So my, you know, my mom would orchestrate a prayer service and we'd have to go out there and and we would see that they'd hand dig a grave and drop a casket in there, and my mom would have a prayer service, and that was it.
But that was a that's a memory for sure when you're a little kid.
In fact, on the wall, there is a poem that is engraved on the headstone there.
And I have it in my office just to remind me of those days.
I mean, it's very sad.
I mean, people they didn't have any parents or guardians and and the state I guess didn't want to spend the money for headstones and they didn't know how accurate headstone could be.
I mean, some of these kids didn't even have birth certificates.
I think we came to appreciate how fortunate we were you know?
I mean, you know, we were mainstreamed, went to school and and we had parents that cared about us.
We had clothing and not a lot, but it was a it was a great childhood.
And I think when you when you saw kids that never, never had the advantage of living at home and never saw their families, a lot of a lot of kids would be there, the state school, their whole life, and nobody ever come to visit them.
The fifties began with the last building constructed on the campus.
The personnel building, located on the corner of what is now East State and Parnell, was completed in 1953.
Overall, the fifties were a period of mixed messages.
On one hand, a visitor to the institution would see residents in overcrowded infirmaries, dormitories and day rooms, sitting and lying in a hopeless manner.
Some crippled, and idiot appearing, lean over carts or lie doubled up in bed, wrote Kenneth Weaver in a march 12, 1956, News Sentinel article.
On the other hand, a growing philosophical change on how to care for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities was taking place.
Instead of simply warehousing these individuals and providing the most basic custodial care, it was now being recognized that with the right training this population, although limited can be taught to perform simple tasks.
What we needed to do primarily was to adjust our own thinking on the staff.
That it's not the fault of the lower functioning clients that they can't or don't learn.
It's the responsability of the staff to not only educate and train the higher functioning, but also to educate and train the lower functioning.
I presume this was sort of a national recognition.
I don't know that people with profound intellectual disabilities could be trained to use the bathroom on a schedule to pull on clothing, feed themselves.
I guess all of that had been done in atrocious kinds of ways.
I mean, you know, like herding cattle, kinds of ways.
And some of the other psychologists and people at that point could begin to see the potential if we could train the lower functioning half of our population to begin to do some of these things for themselves, real basic.
And the idea was you got to start where they are, not where you want them to be, but where they actually are now.
You need to get their attention.
You need to have something that they'll work for.
something that's reinforcing to them.
And then you've got to understand, to take them from where they are to where the next step would be, you got to break it down into small steps.
For instance, if you're spoon feeding, you put the spoon in their hand.
You put your hand over there's and you help them guide it down to the food and get some food that they like that they're used to that doesn't put them off.
And then you bring it up to their mouth and you help them put it in their mouth.
So they get used to the spoon and the feel and that.
And then you do that a few times and then you continue.
So you stop just short of their mouth and then it doesn't take very long at all before they know how to do the last inch or two.
And then you stop further away, further away, further away, and you fade yourself, out.
So that when you get done shaping and backing out of it as a helper and not providing the cues for all the whole way, then they can do the whole process themselves and then they can begin to spoon feed themselves.
That's just an example.
It varies a little bit, but all the self-help skills are kind of that way.
You can do things with the behavior management controlling them by not rewarding behavior if it was bad and rewarding the good behavior because there were so few staff that really were dealing with most of them, it was left up to the direct care staff that worked with them, who treated them like they did their own children.
Part of our job was to train damaged and lower functioning human beings, to act more in our frame of reference in a way more human, being able to feed themselves, being able to put urine and feces in the toilet instead of on the floor.
And then, they're happier, they can do other things.
The staff is happier.
Some staff were amazingly adapted to doing getting rewarding them and withholding rewards, not punishing them.
They knew more about how to deal with these clients than, you know, people in the universities who'd never seen them before.
And people needed to understand that other people, if they're alive, they learn.
You're always learning something, whether it's what you should learn or not, or it's what your teacher wants you to learn.
You always learn.
So it's our job as psychologists and staff to make sure as much as we can that they're learning the right things.
You can't just put people on the shelf and turn them off.
They don't get turned off.
They always learn.
So that was another concept we had to get across to people that no matter what happens with these clients, they're always learning something.
So you make sure that they're learning the right things, the helpful things, things they need to learn.
Along with these came a revolution in psychiatric treatment, drugs.
An antihistamine drug was effectively being used to calm the symptoms of schizophrenia, and it became the world's first antipsychotic drug.
It was called chlorpromazine, marketed with a brand name, Thorazine.
In 1954, the FDA approved the drug for the treatment of mental disorders, and it was used widely across the nation.
One ad claimed that Thorazine reduced or eliminates the need for restraint and seclusion, improves ward morale speeds, release of hospitalized patients, reduces destruction of personal and hospital property.
Another drug discovery was the sedative Meprobamate, marketed as Milltown and known as the Peace Pill or Emotional Aspirin.
For the first time, psychiatrists and institutions had effective tools to reduce and sometimes eliminate some of the more damaging symptoms of mental disorders.
In 1956, Bernard Dolnick became the superintendent of the Fort Wayne State School.
He inherited dilapidated buildings, a less than adequate staff that were too few in numbers and too low in wages.
A transition in care and treatments, and an ever growing number of residents with disabilities.
One of the first things Dolnick did was remove last remnants of a bygone era, meaning jail cells, whipping straps, leg and arm irons and straitjackets, the doors and bars on basement cells were removed and shackles were unbolted from the walls and floors.
But the bygone era could not be removed from the structures themselves.
Out of the 23 buildings that made up the institution, 17 were listed in either poor or fair condition.
Dolnick decided it would be better to start over than try to remodel, update and expand the existing buildings.
With the farming being phased out.
He developed a long range plan to build a new facility on the Parker Place farmland in the area of State Road 37 and Saint Joe Road.
Dolnick saw the need to attract psychologists and therapists to better serve the patients.
And new specialists would want a university nearby to continue studies and research.
He approached Alan Kettler of Purdue University Extension in downtown Fort Wayne about creating a new campus on the Oak Park Farm property that was owned by the state school.
The state legislature approved the transfer of 114 acres to Indiana and Purdue universities to build a jointly operated education center.
This put an end to the farms and 337 acres of the Blackhawk farm was sold to be developed into subdivision housing.
The funds were used to finance the building of the first new dormitory on the 160 acre Parker Place site.
Ground was broken and construction began on August 20th, 1959.
Governor Harold Handley flew into Smithfield and was the main speaker for the occasion.
In the summer of 1960, during the groundbreaking of a second building, Superintendent Dolnick spoke about the long range plans for the new facility.
It would include 30 structures house more than 2400 people and be valued at 25 to $30 million.
Dolnick had asked for almost 10 million from the state.
In July, he found out the Indiana Division of Mental Health had trimmed that amount to just over 4 million.
At the time, the Fort Wayne State School was the most overcrowded of all state operated facilities 71% overcapacity.
They had four psychiatrists on staff, but needed 15 to meet minimum standards.
Due to noncompetitive salaries, they continued to have a high turnover rate and staff shortages.
We didn't have people that were advocating for the population that we had.
People were embarrassed that they had somebody living there or that they had a child that was in need of special help.
Some of them were so funding was a struggle every year and a lot of times people making decisions, broad decisions, they knew little to nothing about our operation or how their decision would affect our operation.
So it's like, this is what you're given.
These are how many widgets you have.
So do the best you can, you know, kind of thing.
And sometimes you had more widgets, sometimes you had less.
Dolnick was undeterred and continued to look forward.
In the fall, the first residents from the old State Street site moved into Johnson Hall on the Parker Place campus, signaling the beginning of the relocation of the state school.
The dorm housed 192 people within eight separate wards of 24 beds per unit.
The units had partitions separating them into three sections of eight beds.
The new dorm also included a glass enclosed nurse's station, day rooms and basement recreational and occupational therapy space.
The facility at that time was very proud of this new campus.
They had been stuck on State Street for many, many years, and the facility was kind of getting more and more outmoded and decaying and was terribly overcrowded.
I've heard all kinds of stories about how they'd have to move beds out of the way for the person to get in bed in the farthest corner and then, you know, and I think we got up to as many as 2500 clients at both sites.
The new site, it took a long time to get any kind of program areas.
They had built nothing but beds out there.
The second dorm, Hurley Hall, opened in August 1961.
That year, Dolnick was re-appointed as superintendent of the school for another four years.
Shortly after, he was named acting director of the Division of Mental Retardation within the Indiana Department of Mental Health.
In his dual role, Dolnick pushed for additional funding for the institutions.
Within the next few years, construction at the Parker Place site was nonstop projects included a 200 bed pediatric hospital with a specialized ward for children who were involved in onsite, nutritional and metabolic research.
This building was named Harshman Hall.
Other projects comprised seven cottage housing units or 392 residents, and additional housing for 418, which included a highly specialized treatment center for extremely problematic boys and girls.
Also planned was a 200 bed ward for severely retarded individuals, three 56 bed resident cottages and a new central supply and maintenance warehouse.
By January 1965, the state school had 1,020 employees between both campuses.
In March, the General Assembly changed the institutions name to the Fort Wayne State Hospital and Training Center to better reflect the rehabilitative and vocational training aspects of the institution.
Dolnick was selected by the Governor to be the commissioner of the State Department of Corrections.
Dr. Ora Ackerman was named superintendent in 1966 and took on the responsibility of maintaining the two sites.
At that point, there were 2,589 people under the care of the centers.
1,000 of them were still at the State Street campus, dealing with leaky roofs, broken water pipes and fire hazards.
Some were slated to be moved to the new site as soon as housing was available.
In May 1967, five residential buildings were dedicated.
Most named for past superintendents Dunham Hall, McGonagle Hall, Biggs Hall, Morgan Hall and Dolnick Hall.
The Ginsburg Rehabilitation Center was also dedicated.
The $2 million facility, provided vocational rehabilitation and training for residents seeking to live in the community.
The end of the 60s saw, the end of several buildings at the Old State Street location.
Several of the cottage dormitories were demolished, as well as a few old farm buildings still remaining on the Parker Place campus.
A natural consensus was building that individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities be given the opportunity, skills and financial support to live in the least restrictive environment.
The first big step was the transferring of residents with only medical needs to nursing homes.
The idea was that the institution should be a training center, not a medical facility.
We had people well up into retirement age.
That was the first group that was moved largely to nursing facilities in the seventies because it was age appropriate.
Many residents had been institutionalized since they were children and these changes could seem very overwhelming.
Residents age 55 and older had preparatory classes before they moved that show them what to expect in their new surroundings.
By the fall of 1971, 215 residents had been placed in 83 facilities.
Within 37 counties.
176 men and women still remained at the old site.
In 1975, the education for all handicapped Children Act was passed by Congress.
It mandated that all children, regardless of their intellectual, developmental or physical disabilities, be given the same educational opportunities as all other children.
This groundbreaking legislation finally allowed children living at home and in institutions all across the country the ability to attend a public school.
Back then, the public schools were doing little to nothing, in special education.
I knew I was in that time working on my advanced degrees and was in the classroom with a lot of superintendents, a lot of principals.
And I told them they're coming.
And some of the things that they were going to face doing it.
Kids got on a bus, got dropped off.
Kids who needed a wheelchair could take the wheelchair and ride on the bus and get to school and get services from their wheelchair.
Kids with behavioral problems.
We tried to help with as much as possible.
There were times when we sent staff to the classroom to assist.
I think the schools at that time did not have teacher assistance the way they do now.
Fort Wayne, I think, did as good a job as you could.
They hired many of our teachers.
Holland School took large group of them.
We had 135, I think initially that were in the public schools.
So they had to go and actually participate with other people, listen to a teacher that wasn't any one of us.
Eat in a facility that wasn't overseen by us and they weren't always welcome.
So their behaviors may have increased.
We started providing supervision on the school busses.
I can remember the first week that we they had walkie talkies on their busses.
Somebody went around by Mr. Wiggs over there on Coliseum where Kmart was and pulled in there and called on the phone.
I was there.
We were loading up and we could hear them talking to each other.
I need help.
I need help.
Margaret has eaten all the lunches of all the kids on the bus.
And who put Margaret on a bus?
No supervision with nothing but elementary school children, who all had little boxes of food.
We got kicked out all the time.
My kids sent back all the time.
Some of them got sent back by an hour.
Some sent back two hours.
They couldn't handle behaviors.
They couldn't handle the seizures.
They couldn't handle a lot of things because it never happened before.
And the parents of the children that were they thought, why are you sending my child to the school doesn't have any verbal ability.
Finally decided that getting on that bus, they became much more aware of the things around them and they started learning a little bit of language.
They were mixed in with the normal population.
It got them out of here.
They saw the world.
They saw other people.
It needed to happen.
We applauded it happened.
But it wasn't easy for them.
That was life changing, from that generation forward, all kids were taught they should be part of the society.
And all parents were taught by nature that, that their children should be part of the society.
By 1978, all of the Fort Wayne State Hospital and Training Center School age children were attending Fort Wayne Community Schools.
June 1st, 1977, marked a major milestone.
The Fort Wayne State Hospital and Training Center became federally certified as an intermediate care facility for the mentally retarded, the first such center in the state to meet the federal Title 19 program requirements.
The center could now bill for Medicaid.
But that also means they had a lot more rules to follow.
So every resident must have their own personal living space that has to be so many square feet.
So that meant you had to meet that need or you're going to lose the money.
It gave them a revenue stream that they had never had.
And that was good.
But you you can't just get it without also meeting these requirements that the federal and state governments demanded.
The preparation was difficult and challenging for 1,300 administrators and staff.
Dr. Ackerman hired 25 additional professionals and administrative personnel.
It brought new ways of thinking, more effective treatment strategies, better staff training, air conditioning, decorated living units and rooms with four or fewer beds in them.
The vocational program was enhanced by establishing a workshop with an outside agency, the Anthony Wayne Rehabilitation Center.
Dr. Ackerman stated it was the first time an independent community agency had set up in a state facility and operated a vocational program.
We had a small workshop on grounds so when we could, we'd secure handwork for the people to do.
We had our own supervisors out there and people earned small paychecks and at least for the day, for a really small percentage of the people out there had a place to go, work and socialize.
No one was forced to come.
And I think the fact that people wanted to come and do something productive.
And I think maybe most importantly, have the dignity of even small paycheck, meant a lot to people.
Agencies were being established all across the country to help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
In Fort Wayne, Easterseals Arc and Anthony Wayne Services are agencies that offered assistance to people with disabilities.
These agencies operated sheltered workshops and built group homes to provide residents at the Fort Wayne State Hospital and Training Center the opportunity to live and work the community.
So a group home is like a nursing home.
An agency owns it.
We own the bed.
We own house.
And we fill a slot.
And Medicaid pays us to do that.
So the state of Indiana would give an agency funding to build home.
We have the option of building one.
If we could get head funding or building funding.
If not, we just bought a house.
So they'd be everyday homes in everyday neighborhoods that simply served people with intellectual disabilities.
They lived there.
We Had staff.
It wasn't their family, but it was small setting.
They would go to our workshops every day.
Later on, we started finding people, some of those people jobs in the community.
We tried to make sure that everything was addressed with the staff verbally and by showing them and also in writing, explaining what the person needed.
What were the communication quirks?
How you could support if they were upset?
What kind of special dietary needs did they have?
Did they have issues with choking?
Did they have health issues?
The housing was certainly better.
To try to find a neighborhood that would accept them, and they could have some freedom to walk to the store and do things and then find staff that understood them and allowed them some freedom, but not enough to where they would get in trouble.
Any time we built or bought a house, typically you're not welcome because they think it brings down your property values.
And we had a lot of groups, associations, neighbors not welcoming.
And now you get the few neighbors knock on your door, bring you cookies.
Welcome.
This is cool.
But that was not the norm.
So again, you are paving the way and advocating.
In 1979, the new $3.5 million activity center, later called the Community Mall, was opened.
At 75,000 square feet, it was the same size as the Memorial Coliseum at the time.
It housed a large pool, gymnasium, domestics skills and vocational training areas.
Libraries for staff and residents.
An audio Visual Studio.
A 135 seat auditorium.
And therapy program rooms.
A simulated workshop provided hands on training in such things as collating, assembling, sorting and packaging skills needed for employment in the community.
Other training included development of socialization and personal skills such as grooming, appropriate dressing and manners.
The mall aspect had the corner fashions clothing store, Shear Delight Barber and Beauty Shop and the Chat and Snack Canteen.
The Clothing Store featured the newest styles and colors far removed from the gray uniforms the residents used to make for themselves.
They could dress and look like everyone else in the community, which promoted the feeling of inclusion and acceptance.
The center also included a video production studio where the institution could make their own training tapes for staff and informational programs for the residents.
In the middle of the community mall, a statue was placed in the center of the main hallway.
The statue was named The Contenders.
When you walked into this main building, you would see this statue.
And there's a little inscription underneath.
And kind of the concept of that was that these two children that it depicts are learning to contend with whatever life may have for them.
The inscription on the base of the statue reads All of us look for an arena in which we can fairly and proudly contend.
We are here to pick our arena and to train for the day we can contend in it.
They were contending with a lot of things, a lot of factors maybe related to their disability, but they also learned what I can do in life.
The community mall's success was not reflected in the General Assembly's allotment of funds.
They cut over $7 million from the facility's budget, leading to a reduction in staff.
The eighties began with the same news due to more budget cuts.
Over 120 staff would have to be eliminated.
Usually the budgeting process in the state of Indiana back then, public education, higher education, they got a much higher percent of the budget than mental health would get, corrections was even worse.
But mental health was not high on the food chain.
So we were always understaffed.
Funding was it was just a struggle to have enough to do what we could do with it.
And we did the best we could with what we had.
Dr. Ackerman was committed to the philosophy of returning as many as possible to their homes and communities to lead useful, purposeful lives.
But the training and behavior modifications needed for life outside the institutions took time.
By 1980, all departments from the old site had been relocated to the Parker Place campus.
The once magnificent administration building was abandoned.
The walls were dark with soot from the 90 years of coal burning in the power plant.
It was soon to be torn down, but there was a debate about what to do with the property.
The Board of Park Commissioners petitioned the state of Indiana to deed the property to the city of Fort Wayne for the purpose of building a park.
In 1981, a bond package was secured to fund the project.
In August of 1982, the administration building was demolished.
On June four, 1983, North Side Park officially opened.
The park now included two pavilions, tennis courts, a playground, basketball courts and a public pool.
It also included the Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department's central offices, which are the old personnel building of the state school on the corner of East State and Parnell Avenue.
There are other remnants of the former campus around the park.
The old gym is still there, looking like it could host a basketball game from the 1940s or fifties.
An old horse stable built in the 1890s is now used for meetings and rented for parties.
And on the south end of Northside Park.
There stands a single pillar.
During the demolition one of the exterior pillars that framed the front entrance of the main administration building was saved.
It stands as a memorial to the state school and a reminder of the people who called it home.
A plaque was placed on the pillar by the city of Fort Wayne in 1983, when the park opened.
In the early sixties one of Indiana's only residential homes for the retarded state school, as it was then known, was on State Street.
Since moving to its new facility across from Canterbury Green, the Fort Wayne State Hospital and Training Center has undergone many changes.
Withme live in the NEWSROOM is the chief executive officer for the state hospital.
Dr. Ackerman, welcome.
Thank you, Marty.
One of the things which seems to change the most about the hospital is its name.
You'll be changing names again.
Officially this week.
What will the new name be?
The real change is taking place inside the facility, but the purpose of the new name is to better describe that we're a developmental center, caring for the needs of people, and it softens the fact.
The first name was Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth, which is really a derogatory, discrediting kind of a name.
What was formerly known as the Fort Wayne State Hospital will now be called the Fort Wayne Development Center.
About 70% of the residents at the center are profoundly or seriously retarded.
That means they need close supervision at all times.
But nonresidential patients can care for their own basic needs.
Superintendent, Ora Ackerman, says the name change will make it easier for them to blend into the community.
If the general public understands that and they can understand that, we can train and there can be some things, it's going to allow those people to be able to use the communities in a much more or less restricted manner than they may have.
To go along with the name change the center is seeking national accreditation.
If it gets it, Ackerman says, it will be the first developmental center in the state to receive that honor.
At the Parker Place campus, WITV channel, 2, began as the training center's closed circuit television channel.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of the Developmental Center News.
The TV studio produced weekly programs for residents and staff such as Kaleidoscope, Scrabble, Devotions, Your Town, News Briefs and Zoom in.
Dr. Ackerman wanted to provide each resident with individual attention and allow them to make personal choices for themselves.
This meant removing the role of custodians and making the staff facilitators instead.
Residents were now called individuals and recognized for their personal characteristics and skills.
The center itself was changing with artwork, decorations, rearranging furniture and brighter areas to enhance the overall quality of life.
People were wearing regular clothing, not institutional clothing that just pulled on.
They had bedrooms with no more than four people in them.
They had lockers for their clothing and personal items.
They had a nightstand.
They had a bed.
They had a chair.
The day rooms were more like living rooms.
They had television and games and things, depending on what the people living there were interested in and could do.
So things evolved very nicely over the eighties and nineties.
Back years ago, to be mentally retarded, meant to be scorned and hidden away like an animal.
In fact, many animals were treated better than those with mental handicaps.
Well, this is 1985, and I'm happy to say that times are slowly changing.
Tonight on Health Beat, a look at how far we've come and how far we still have to go, what you're watching is myth shattering in progress.
24 mentally retarded people taking in a jazz concert at the Foellinger Theater.
Mental retardation is not an illness, it's a condition, and it's one that doesn't have to deprive people of the joys of living.
That's the theory behind the state Developmental Center's Project Pal or Program for accelerated learning.
Instead of keeping the mentally retarded behind locked doors, they're taken out in the community for dinners, concerts, movies and other forms of entertainment and learning.
It's good for the individuals and it's good for the public.
The community itself, you know, has all sorts of weird ideas as to what these individuals are like.
They're not, in most cases, what they think they are or what they've been led to believe.
In 1986, the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center earned a prestigious honor being accredited by the Accreditation Council for Services to Developmental Disabled Persons.
By early 1987, they had surpassed the stringent ACMR/DD standards and became the state's first fully accredited facility for the developmentally disabled.
When I got here, the measured intelligence and adaptive level were about the same.
Profound, severe, moderate, mild, borderline.
But when I left the measured intelligence was still the same.
You still had measured intelligence of a profound.
But the adaptive behavior was one or two notches higher.
Instead of the adaptive behavior also being profound, it would be severe or moderate and much higher than the measured intelligence.
And that is a just a humongous measurement of progress.
Now, we were dealing with an aspect of society that wasn't given a lot of priorities.
So that kind of progress, I think, has not been recognized as much as it should have been.
What I saw with the lower functioning, there was as much progress in that part of our world as there was in the space program from where we were to where it went.
Anthony Lardydell came to live at the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center in 1987.
During his time there, he received training in socialization and personal skills as well as vocational training in workshops.
They taught us to be a gentleman, to act like a gentleman in there.
Well, a lot of training, really.
A lot of training for us to be on the job and it has to be the treatment.
I went in the workshop.
They have like a little workshop in there and they teach us to be out on the job and everything to do chores.
Anthony also attended Snider High School and participated in sports at school as well as at the Developmental Center.
So I went to Snider high school from the state hospital and everything and I was a basketball I was a basketball manager and Bonnie Bogenschutz took me to basketball games and stuff, you know.
One of our primary objectives at the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center is to develop the skills of our individuals who, live here and help them adapt to everyday activities.
It is always good to see the individuals develop their skills and eventually get placed in group homes, coordinated with outside agencies.
Through the coordination of staff members, Bonnie Bogenschutz and Margaret Burgess of Johnson Complex.
Tony was fortunate enough to assist the Snider high school basketball team this past winter.
I don't know who prospered the most, Tony, the ball team members or the coaching staff.
Tony is well-liked, the ball team members, and to show their appreciation, the team all pitched in and bought Tony his own Snider basketball jacket with his name on it for Christmas and he is really proud of that jacket.
But he earned it.
Tony helped lead warmups, passed out towels and water and encouraged his team members.
He attended practice sessions during the week and official games as well.
First year head coach Jim Russo said at a practice session that Tony is a joy to be around because of his friendly nature.
Jim also said that it was the team members idea to give him the jacket and the money came entirely from them.
At the annual Basketball Recognition Banquet at Snider High School, Tony was recognized, along with other team members, for his outstanding work during the recent basketball season.
Coach Russo said that they could always count on Tony to brighten up their spirits because he constantly had an ear to ear smile on his face.
Coach Russo said that he, his coaching staff nor the team members were not doing this to benefit the school system.
But we're doing this for Tony.
Who would you say came out the winner in a case like this?
Everybody did.
The Fort Wayne State Developmental Center.
Snider Basketball.
Snider High School.
Coach Russo and his staff.
Snider Basketball players and especially Tony, benefited from this experience.
I did a lot of stuff at Snider High School.
I mean, I went to a lot of my dances at Snider High School, morp, prom, graduation.
I went I went to all the high school football games there, you know.
I finally graduated and got my diploma and they got my, my, my, my high school yearbook.
I got my yearbook in there about my graduating.
And at the Fort Wayne State Hospital, I went to the prom, too.
I went to the prom helped at the prom night, too.
And everything.
My first prom.
And then my first graduation, you know.
After he graduated high school, Anthony was able to move into a group home in the community, secure employment and become a productive member of society.
They helped me help me get out on my own.
They they helped me to be responsibility and everything.
They helped me with a lot of things about being a good man and everything about being being responsible person, with my apartment being clean up your apartment and take care of yourself and take care of your financial needs.
You got to just stay with your means.
Go take care of your house and take care of your responsibilities too.
In 1989, Dr. Ora Ackerman resigned as the superintendent, having been at the helm for 22 years.
When he started, the population had been over 2,500.
Now it was around 700.
As more individuals graduated out into the community.
The staff and resident population continued to decrease.
The residents that remained were those with the most challenging behavioral needs.
Many had dual diagnoses, meaning they suffered from an intellectual disability as well as a mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
I can remember sitting Dr. Mukherjee sitting in his office.
He was the superintendent the first time I was out there, and there had been an incident and I don't remember the exact details except it did involve injury to a resident.
And I interviewed him.
And I remember thinking that this is a difficult place to work and a difficult place to manage because of the population of people and it was a challenging time.
Abuse of residents at several state developmental centers, including Fort Wayne, became a serious issue.
Many attributed this problem to the caliber of employees that were being hired to work as direct care staff and the difficulty of the clients that they had to work with.
We had many staff people who were just gems, you know.
They were wonderful.
We had many who I suspect had not completed high school and they would get a job here.
And it was a job.
It wasn't a vocation and it wasn't well paid and, you know, so there were times when we had staff that weren't were not doing their job or could be abusive even.
And when that was discovered, of course, they were fired.
But it wasn't always easy to discover.
I think that was a failure of The State Developmental Center, the calibur of people that came there just for a check, they didn't care.
You know, not all people, but a lot of people that the care and the empathy, sympathy just wasn't there.
And that makes it hard for a supervisor.
In the beginning, we were short of help and everybody worked together and we took care of our individuals.
But then the more people they brought in, the more adttitudes and.
It just wasn't the same.
And I just thought one day I had my time and I wasn't going to get another cent more retired.
And so I went up to Human Resources and said, I'm leaving here in March.
And the superintendent, he said, Please stay one more year.
I said, If I do, I'll be over in the lock up and I won't be no good for you because I'll be in the lock up because I mean, it was just terrible.
The folks that we was getting in for direct care.
It was just bad.
And we still had the low functioning individuals that we had to care for.
And I said, no more of this, I'm leaving.
I was intending to stay one more year.
No.
There was one that I felt that was abusing an individual that I got very disturbed about.
But when you can't prove something, you can't do nothing about it.
We had some staff that were very good with individuals, but used inappropriate means of restraint if a person became violent.
We had individuals injured.
We had a couple I don't remember.
There were some deaths over the years.
The one gentleman lived in Fort Wayne and he decided he was mad.
He was going to ride his bicycle home at 9:00 at night and the staff wouldn't let him go.
SAT on him, didn't let his lungs expand and actually suffocated him.
There was someone who was beaten badly.
No one was ever convicted of it, but died from his beating.
I remember the first years on my beat thinking all I ever do is write negative stories about the state developmental center.
There were too many incidents of injury of poor care, and it snowballed because staff, more staff would quit and they needed you know, it ended up being the fewer staff, the higher the incidence of issues.
There were some very regrettable incidents.
By 1998, the state started shutting down the institutions, starting with the developmental centers at Newcastle and South Bend.
In the nineties, I think that there was a lot of misunderstanding.
There was fear that people had fear that we don't want them in our community living.
I don't want them living next door.
Yet there were.
That was the movement that was beginning to really take hold around the nation at that time was community based services.
In 2001, there were 320 individuals at Fort Wayne, but it was still the largest institution for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the state.
By 2003, when the Muscatatuck State Developmental Center in Southern Indiana closed, Fort Wayne had the only state institution for the developmentally disabled in Indiana.
By the time I was working with the transition team, the Department of Justice had been involved with the move to the community here in Indiana for a number of years.
It had already been done at Newcastle and Northern Indiana State Hospital.
Those facilities had been closed as institutions for people with disabilities.
And Fort Wayne was kind of left as the last outpost in the state.
And so by that time, the transition process had become very elaborate.
So then here they would have a team working on people leaving.
You know they had met this family or this client, and they said, Oh, we think he's ready to leave.
So we would come here on their turf, meet, look at all their medical, our nurses would come, you know, the whole thing.
Can we serve this person?
And we have to look at group dynamics.
Let's say the person here is still hitting people.
In the house we have they're more fragile.
Couldn't put him in that house.
Now, this house, maybe if we have an opening because they can defend themselves and we could work it better or he's got more medical care than we can staff in this house.
So you base it on the opening, you had the licensing and the other constituents that lived there.
It could take us two or three years sometimes for them to feel ready.
And so then finally there would be visits, weekend visits or something overnight stays and stuff to see how it went.
The person felt comfortable and was compatible with the other individuals and so forth, and ultimately there would be a final transition meeting when everybody would meet and update all the information and the person would be taken off to their new home by the new agency.
Moving people out of the institutions and into the community had become the thinking, the dominant thinking, although there are still institutions throughout the country.
In Indiana, they made a conscious decision over decades to close the developmental centers.
The state was saying there's changes coming and I would interview the FSSA secretary.
It was Mitch Robb at the time and say, what are those changes?
Well, we just don't know yet.
Then they would hold a community meeting that anybody could come to, but it was usually just parents or loved ones.
Very few people, maybe a legislator or two.
You might have 50 people at the meeting.
Employees would show up.
But it wasn't this outcry from the community that you would think would have surfaced from what was going on.
By this time, many of the buildings on the site were empty.
You know, by 2000, there were many buildings that nobody was living in and they weren't even needed for office space or anything.
So It kind of the gradual downsizing of the state developmental center almost went under the radar, I felt, of the general population.
In early 2005, the state hired a private, out-of-state company named, Liberty Health Care Corporation, to run the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center starting January 1st of 2006.
In October of 2005, the Indiana Family and Social Service Administration announced it would close the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center by June 30th, 2007.
The announcement brought mixed reactions for parents and guardians of individuals with significant behavioral issues or violent tendencies.
The announcement generated fear many of the residents were in their fifties and their parents were elderly.
We're Eugene and Mildred and our son Alan resides here at the Fort Wayne Developmental Center.
We've been quite active through the years with Alan.
We usually visit him once a week, weather permitting, and go swimming and take him for rides and so on.
But as our as we grow older, we realize that one day down the line, we're not going to be able to do these sort of things for Alan.
In fact, we will no longer be here one day, and we're concerned about who will make these decisions for Alan when we're no longer around to do it.
The final facilities were closed when Mitch Daniels was governor, and the time frame for all the developmental centers was way behind.
It was proceeding but very slowly, and liberty came in and they wanted to expedite the process.
That's what they had been contracted to do.
And so we had this transition team that was being so careful doing all these things to make the Department of Justice happy and also to assure the welfare of the people we were moving.
And so I think they perceived that as much too thorough.
And by then there were two transition teams.
And so both of us were transferred to the receiving end and they took over with a process of their own.
So we had already had a history not only of operating the workshop out there, but taking many of the residents into our programs, into our residential programs.
So we weren't the sole provider, but there was a group of providers at that point who are very interested and committed into moving people out.
We worked on the task force with the leadership at Fort Wayne and one by one, move people out.
There was at that point a very well defined process.
Everyone has a plan for inclusion in the community, which would include some type of vocational goal, whether it's to work in one of our sheltered businesses, a job in the community, often a combination of those two.
There's also always a plan for general community integration.
So it would be things like entertaining activities, but also just specifically designed opportunities to try and interact with and develop friendships, relationships with the broader population.
It seemed like by the time it actually closed, there was there was very little press about it.
I think there was a press release that came out and I wrote a story and they said there were like 11 people left.
The last resident of the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center moved out on April 18th, 2007.
So it finally closed, became a school, and we seemed to have all existed just fine and the community seems to be functioning without an institution in the midst of it.
The first question I was usually asked when I said I worked here was How do you do that?
How can you stand to work there?
You know, those people, why do you let them out in the community?
I can't believe you can do that.
Other people, oh, you're so kind to do that.
You're so nice.
I don't know how you do it.
You're just the best person and a lot of people say you don't have to work there.
I know that.
I know I didn't have to work there, but I got kind of attached and I always thought I was helping somebody.
And then we had all these classes and what we learned that anybody could have a retarded child and we all that didn't have one was thankful.
So we thought maybe we owe it to the families that had to leave their kids there.
You see a need and you think that you can do a little bit to help fill that need and make it a better place than when you came.
People got attached to the clients, they got to find out how to work with them and they enjoyed it.
That's probably what kept them there.
They enjoyed working with these clients and didn't want to leave them.
I got adjusted to the individuals and I just needed to be there and see them.
There was a real bond among staff who worked here.
You know, there were many, many staff.
So the people you worked with, it felt like family, you came to work you had your work family.
You had clients residents, individuals who are part of your work family.
Again, from my own point of view, it was just a lot of progress made.
And so I enjoyed either observing it or being part of it, a small part sometimes, but still a part of it.
I enjoyed most of the time that I was there with them and I felt that I was doing some good.
It gave me a good feeling and with the experience I had with them, I felt I was helping a lot of them.
And I'd see many of our staff out in the agencies now, working in the workshops, working in the houses, driving the busses and vans, and that really were still enjoying the companionship they made with the clients that they knew.
It was an interesting time and you know, we all talk about it now we were out to lunch last week.
Some of us old timers, we get together usually once a year in August.
We, everybody that we can get in touch with.
We all go to Golden Corral and reminisce.
But, we all say we have a special place up there.
I enjoyed my stay there that that was something I still remember and go by there and I drive through there occasionally.
The state had already given Ivy Tech, Community College, Fort Wayne and Indiana, Purdue, Fort Wayne, some property and buildings and the property closest to the intersection of Saint Joe and Stellhorn Roads had been used to create the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center.
Now the remainder of the developmental center campus was divided up between IPFW and Ivy Tech, while many of the buildings were torn down.
Ivy Tech renovated the community mall building currently Ivy Techs, Student Life Center, the contenders statue that stood at the center of the mall was moved to the old state school cemetery grounds across Saint Joe Road.
A small ceremony was held to dedicate the placement of the statue and pay tribute to the former residents of the state school who are buried there.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The AWS Foundation had an updated plaque created and mounted on the Pillar Memorial in North Side Park.
We're standing here on the site of the 1889 Fort Wayne asylum for feeble minded children.
Yes, that's what it was called, the asylum for feeble minded children.
Later, it was just called the state school.
Language changes.
And this plaque did have the language representative of the words of 1983.
Words once used as descriptive, like mentally retarded.
We now categorize those words as derisive.
We are here today to erase those two outdated words from the original plaque that was put here in 1983.
This new plaque will reference using the words It's now the home for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The old plaque will become part of the collection at the Fort Wayne History Center.
It's important that we acknowledge changes big and small that happen in this community.
And with that, I'm to ask Todd and Steve to remove and unveil the plaque.
In 1957, the state hospital stood here.
I visit almost every day because my father worked here.
My father was the chief social worker for the Fort Wayne State Hospital, and I used to come by, visit him.
And the office was right where you're standing.
I would visit him to find out how he could work with all of these people who were mentally retarded.
He said, Well, first of all, they don't know that they're mentally challenged.
He said, So first of all, be aware of that.
He said, Secondly, don't ever forget their work.
Even though we've locked them away, so to speak, in this Fort Wayne State Hospital and very few of them ever have any kind of public exposure except to each other.
They still have worth and they still have dignity.
And don't ever forget that.
That's why this plaque is so important today.
We recognize that we all have value.
We all have dignity.
So I personally, sincerely want to thank all who were involved in this.
This means a lot to me, not only professionally, but personally as well.
I think my father would have been very proud that we finally recognized everyone's place in our community.
In the summer of 2021, landscape renovations took place at the cemetery on Saint Joe Road where the Contenders statue now stands.
Decorative stonework was installed around the memorial area and beautiful gardens were also planted.
The newly updated cemetery grounds were rededicated to honor those who had passed away while living at the state school.
Today I would like to share this blessing.
Let us pray.
God, our Creator we come to you this day to honor the souls whose unmarked graves that surround us.
In this garden of remembrance are former residents of the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center.
We thank you for their lives, however humble or obscure, many planted crops or milked cow some sewed clothing or canned food.
Some provided domestic labor to families in the community.
Those most limited were fed, clothed and bathed in a seemingly meaningless existence, day in and day out.
We remember God.
They were created in your image, just as we are.
Their lives had value, regardless of society's opinion.
Forgive us this day for their anonymous burials.
You know their names and they are dear to you.
You are their good shepherd.
Bless this final resting place with peace and hope.
May we learn individual dignity and respect from those who rest here.
Bless the former residents, of the developmental center, as they lead productive lives in our community today.
Help us to always see the potential in people with disabilities rather than their limitations.
And now, dear Lord, draw those of us who remain in this life closer to one another.
Give us peace and joy as.
We depart this garden of remembrance to embrace those who are different from us and help them live cherished lives of dignity.
Amen.
While the buildings and facilities of the old state schools are gone, and those that live there forgotten individuals with enduring intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities still exist.
Along the way, The City of Fort Wayne became the jewel of the state and later the nation in caring for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
It's a legacy worth continuing.