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Parsonage, Old Chatham (1940)

Via the Library of Congress.

Cigar stumps, careless tongues, secret cemeteries, slave labor & the South Bay

ABOVE: Postcard views of The New York State Training School for Girls—whose alumnae rolls are said to have included Ella Fitzgerald—now the Hudson Correctional Facility.

A New York Times article from 1915 detailed allegations of “barbarous” treatment of girls at Training School in Hudson. The management’s defense included this statement:

If a child persists in eating her mush with her fingers, any sensible parent sends her to eat alone. Washing out the mouth with a bitter tonic is an especially wise way of checking a careless tongue, and putting a plaster across the lips an emphatic, practical demonstration of what is to be remembered. It reaches an unthinking mind. It is uncomfortable and ridiculous, but not in the least painful.

Covering the mouth with a wet towel is only for extreme cases of exagggerated violent excitement and is incurred by only four-tenths of one per cent of the pupils. As the nose is left free, strangling and suffocation are impossible. Handcuffs and leg links are necessary in cases of uncontrolled hysterical violence, such as lead a girl to break all the panes of glass in her window, cut her arms with it, or to dash her head against the wall. The presence of three or four officers is required in all cases of serious discipline in order that no person may bear the responsibility and the girl herself may be impressed with the seriousness of the occasion.

A brief (and less eyebrow-raising) narrative of the Training School’s history from the time of its opening in 1904 until its closing in 1975 can be found is found at Prison Talk. Among the many reasons why girls could be sent there? Collecting cigar stumps:

The Training School’s population increased, reaching a high of about 500 girls aged 11 to 15. Additional property was acquired and additional cottages were constructed. Many of the original small cottages were demolished and replaced with larger buildings in the 1920s and ’30s. The board fence also was torn down. 

Many of the girls were received for the same offenses as their predecessors from the House of Refuge days: petty theft, prostitution and drunkenness. To these were added “status offenses”—acts that were criminal only by virtue of the girl’s status as a minor. These included “wilful disobedience to parents,” “frequenting the company of thieves,” “being in concert saloons, dance-houses, theatres or places where liquor sold or served,” and “collecting cigar stumps, bones or refuse for market and peddling.”

After conversion to a juvenile institution, education was given greater emphasis. Over the years, the former work programs disguised as “industrial classes” were supplemented with vocational courses in typing and shorthand, home nursing, waitressing and beauty culture. For many years, an incentive to good behavior was “going to the dance” with boys from local public and private institutions. 

In 1973, two years after assuming control of the Training School, DFY announced that the physical plant was falling apart and there was no money to rebuild. They also argued that the girls would receive better care in smaller, more modern facilities. Fearing loss of jobs, local citizens waged a prolonged and vociferous campaign to keep the DFY facility open. But it closed in 1975.

Interesting that there was no money to repair the physical plant, yet there was adequate funding to convert it into a minimum-security prison.

The Times’ site also includes a chapter from Nina Bernstein’s 2001 book, The Lost Children of Wilder. This includes references to a “secret cemetery” on the grounds, harsh punishment for escapees, and a plantation-like atmosphere for its largely African-American inmates in the School’s final years:

Shirley remembered the stories she had heard from a housemother and some of the girls. They said a secret graveyard lay hidden in the woods on the Hudson grounds. Years ago, dead babies born to inmates were buried there, and bad girls, too—girls caught trying to escape who later died inside the institution. Other bodies were sent home to their folks for burial, but even after death, runaways were punished. This was their solitary confinement: a cold, dark grave lost in the woods forever.

[...]

Cottage E was the last building in the far quadrangle, the closest to the woods that hid the old cemetery. ... One after another the institution's superintendents had lived there. Tom Tunney, arriving with his wife and four children in 1965, was the last. ... For Tunney, a white liberal who had spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi agitating for Negro civil rights, what came to mind was not England but the antebellum South. His first week at the institution he said to his wife, “My God, Patty, I've got a plantation here to run.”

By then, most of the girls at Hudson were black. Perhaps 35 percent of the staff was, too; many came from black families that had lived for generations in the town of Hudson. Tunney’s first proclamation put a halt to the unpaid labor of inmates in the mansion. When he learned that many staff members were taking girls to their own homes to do laundry and cleaning under the guise of “vocational training,” he decreed that the inmates would have to be paid two dollars an hour. “Suddenly not too many people wanted to take the girls," he would remember.

Bernstein’s book also includes this remarkable capsule history of the demise of Hudson’s fabled South Bay, through the lens of two girls attempting an escape:

They were lost, lost in the vast wetland that had once been the South Bay.

Whaling ships were moored here in another century. The first ones carried the town’s founders, prosperous whalers from Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard who came seeking a safer harbor in the revolutionary world of 1783. 

The Proprieters, as later generations would call them, sailed up the Hudson with all their goods lashed to the decks of their ships, even their disassembled houses. In later years, tugboats idled in the South Bay after guiding great shipping vessels [upriver]. In the 1840s, when impoverished tenant farmers rebelled against their vassalage under Hudson Valley landowners, troopships sailed here, too, bringing soldiers to crush the revolt.

Then the railroad arrived. The New York-to-Albany line was laid on causeways right across the mouth of the South Bay, cutting it off from the river in 1851. An iron factory spewed its wastes into the stranded bay. The bay became a putrid swamp. And on a promontory above this swamp, the House of Refuge for Women was built. The word Refuge was misleading: from the moment the stone and wrought iron gates of the institution first swung open on May 7, 1887, solitary confinement was the preferred mode of treatment.

Perhaps David Cronenberg could be interested in making the Refuge or Training School the subject of his next film.

600 block

Photo noticed at random on Scott Keidong’s Flickr page.

Song Sung Blue

By the author of Sweet Caroline, from The New York Public Library’s digital collection.