Also known as the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth. Indiana’s second oldest mental health facility opened in 1879 at Knightstown. It was relocated to Fort Wayne in 1890. The first patient admitted that year was an eleven year old boy from Ossian, Wells County. It served mentally retarded children from throughout Indiana until 1939, when its service area was reduced to the northern half of the state. Its mission was expanded to include patients of all ages with other developmental disabilities. Before closure in 2007 the facility had admitted 12,162 patients. The center’s admission registers, card index, and a nearly complete set of medical records on microfilm, are at the Indiana State Archives.
Copied from Other Indiana Hospitals for the Mentally Ill and Developmentally Disabled at the Indiana Archives. See also Fort Wayne State Hospital & Training Center aka Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth Cemetery. The name change was discussed around the 1:22 minute mark and closed April 18, 2007 (1:46 minute mark) when the last resident left during Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels administration, 2005 to 2013, from the 1:43 minute mark of The Forgotten PBS documentary.
Fort Wayne Developmental Center on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
See also Allen County Children's Home, Allen County Orphan Home, Allen County Poor Farm, Fort Wayne Children's Home, and St. Vincent Villa Catholic Orphanage.
The history of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act spans several centuries, and chronicles the movement...
Posted by The History Center on Monday, September 14, 2020Monday, September 14, 2020 post by The History Center on Facebook:
The history of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act spans several centuries, and chronicles the movement to ensure people with disabilities can live independent lives. Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act was one of the first pieces of public policy that acknowledged discrimination against people with disabilities. The section banned discrimination on the basis of disability for recipients of federal funds, and was modeled after other existing discrimination laws. Passage of this section highlighted that the difficult socio-economic status of people with disabilities was a result of societal barriers and prejudices, and that people with disabilities as a group faced discrimination in employment, education, and access. The ADA, as we know it today, went through numerous revisions after the first version was introduced in 1988 to the 100th congress. On July 26, 1990 the final bill was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. For the first time in the history of our country, businesses had to stop and think about access to people with disabilities. The ADA is based on a basic presumption that people with disabilities want to work and want to be members of their communities. Due to the passage of the ADA accommodating a person is now a basic issue of civil rights. In many ways, the history of the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center illustrates such national trends. The Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth opened its doors in Fort Wayne in 1890 on East State Street in an area that was, at the time, in the country. It served developmentally disabled children and adults from all over the state. Young children took art, music, and gym classes. Older residents were taught vocational arts divided by gender, with young men learning farming, carpentry, bricklaying, and shoemaking, and young women learned the domestic arts of cleaning, cooking, canning, and laundering. The Indiana legislature changed the school’s name to Fort Wayne State School in 1931. In 1960, many residents moved to the new facility at Stellhorn and St. Joe Roads and was renamed the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center in the 1980s. The site’s original building was demolished in 1982 and its former location is now Northside Park. Visit The History Center to see our new temporary display entitled, “The Americans with Disabilities Act: 30 Years of Protections for People with Disabilities,” which is sponsored by AWS Foundation, now through November 13th. #sociallyhistory
February 7, 2023 post by Indiana Archives and Records Administration on Facebook:
Please welcome our first ever shared intern!
Sam is working on an extensive project to get the physical and digital records of the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center building sites converted and transferred to the Archives.
We are excited to have her on board!