This article is the first part of a historical investigation into the Long Lane School For Girls, an institution for deviant female youth, formerly adjacent to the University’s campus.

 

“The Connecticut Industrial School for Friendless Girls was opened June 20, 1870, in the presence of a large number of persons interested in the humane institutions of the State.”

Thus began the address that filled the pages of the first annual report of the officers of the Connecticut Industrial School for Girls, later to be named Long Lane School. In a section discussing the origin of the school, the officers write, “The want of a suitable place for the custody of neglected and viciously inclined young girls has been felt for several years.”

Middletown, Conn. seemed the perfect area for such a school: a large farm, out of use for several years, was available as land for the school, and Middletown was situated between two more industrialized cities, New Haven and Hartford. Middletown was thus conveniently located for the transport of girls away from their cities, but was far enough away from the ills of urban life that it might provide the “fresh air” deemed so important by the reformers.

In this original report, the “proper subjects” for care or institutionalization at the school were described as “1) The stubborn and unruly… 2) Truants, vagrants and beggars… 3) Those found in circumstances of manifest danger of falling into habits of vice and immorality…” and finally, “4) Those who have committed any offence [sic] punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both, other than imprisonment for life.” The school was not an institution of the state, but rather a charity that received both partial funding and its inhabitants from the state of Connecticut.

In her senior thesis, Sarah A. Leavitt ’92 followed the story of the Connecticut Industrial School for Girls from its beginning. Leavitt writes about Mary R., a 16-year-old inmate at the Industrial School in 1874. According to Leavitt, Mary was transferred to the school from her New Haven home after her mother, a single parent and “washer woman,” became frustrated with the girl’s refusal to either go to school or do housework, and her tendency to stay out late at night and act in a generally “profane” manner.

A few months after Mary was institutionalized at Long Lane, she discovered that she was pregnant. In light of the school’s Victorian values and moralistic goals, Mary was hastily married. She left the school, but by the time she was 20, she returned voluntarily, seeking refuge from life with a husband she described as a “drunk” and from certain poverty.

Poverty was of key interest to the reformers responsible for the Industrial School. Moral vice brought on by the apparently perilous circumstances of the urban poor was a concern, of course, but poverty itself was often considered enough of a reason to institutionalize a child in the 19th century.

The reformers, according to Leavitt, seemed to have a “get ’em while they’re young” mentality when it came to incarceration. They hoped that by spotting children who—by their very impoverished nature—were at risk for legal and moral transgression, they might cure the illness at its root. The Industrial School was even thought of as an alternative to a real women’s prison, for if the girls were educated with Christian values early, they would not transgress later in life.

Mary’s story does not specify if she was of recent immigrant origin or if her family had been in the United States for many years, but immigrant status was a key factor in how likely a girl was to end up in the Industrial School. Irish, Italian, German, and later, Russian, girls made up large sections of the school’s inmates. Their presence, along with the rationales recorded as the reason for their institutionalization, suggests that the school was not imagined simply as a solution to poverty; its founders perceived societal ills like prostitution and theft as grounds for institutionalizing girls and young women. The school was also a way to remove children from what was seen as the corrupting influence of immigrant neighborhoods.

The school was therefore quite diverse, and school officials made some surprising changes to the school to accommodate the myriad cultures within its walls—a Sunday Mass was even added in the late 1800s, despite the distinctly Protestant sentiments of the reformers in charge. Leavitt also points out that black students were always admitted to the school, an interesting choice in a time when the rest of society was so heavily segregated.

Daily life in the school was a surprising jumble of outside society. Girls of various nationalities lived under strict Victorian ideals and learned to act as domestic workers in the hope that they would one day become proper wives and mothers. The school became home to girls who had committed a jumble of offenses; in line with the goals of the school, those who were incarcerated constituted a mix of girls who had genuinely broken the law or were actually “delinquent” and those whose parents were simply too poor or absent to care for them as they went through the normal pangs of adolescence.

Sexual crimes (having sex before marriage) were common reasons for incarceration, but a few girls did commit offenses recognized as criminal even by modern U.S. standards. One girl was arrested for attempting to “set fire to her employer’s house and poison her mistress.”

The girls lived in cottages headed by matrons, who were supposed to act as substitute mother figures to them. The reformers in charge of the school hoped that this would create a family atmosphere, but they were ultimately disillusioned. Soon after the school’s founding, the family system in the cottages made way for a tiered system in which inmates in different stages of “depravity” were divided into different living situations, so that the more troublesome would not corrupt the younger and more innocent.

Furthermore, attempts at creating a family environment were thwarted by the transient nature of its inhabitants: even the girls who lived in relatively calm cottages with internal workrooms would have experienced regular changes in housemates as girls arrived and were released. The school also changed in size, growing from two cottages at its founding in the 1870s to eight cottages by 1917.

Still, some things seemed to remain consistent: each girl was provided with an iron bedstead, a husk mattress, a mirror, a chair, and a small painted pine bureau, according to an 1884 officer’s report. In addition to these basics, the girls were provided with bedding for their mattresses and often used, donated clothes; the girls were described as being dressed neatly in calico dresses by several visitors to the school.

Despite some fear that the solitude would allow for masturbation, each girl was also given her own room. Girls were kept in their rooms at night by an alert system made up of bells that would ring when a girl stepped out of her door. Punishment for transgressions like this included the withholding of food; deprived of standard fare like beef and cabbage, soup, or beans, the girls were instead given only bread and water.

“Everyday life at the Connecticut Industrial School for Girls was divided between meals, academic schoolwork, vocational training, recreation, and prayer,” Leavitt wrote in her thesis.

In school, the girls learned to read and were even taught science and math, an unusual feature for reform schools at that time, which typically focused on only “lower-class skills.” Still, the school did focus on training the girls for what it considered feasible pursuits for women. Domestic training was key, and “consisted of cooking, sewing, and laundry.”

Reformers hoped that the girls would be fit to act as servants after leaving the school, or even to raise their own families with the skills they acquired. Whether the reformers were successful in their goal of improving the futures of their wards is unclear, but Leavitt suggests that, at the very least, they didn’t “inhibit [their] inmates’ already stagnated social mobility.”

Over the years following this initial period of general adherence to the founders’ ideals, the Connecticut Industrial School for Girls changed in ways that its original supporters never would have expected, though all the time reflecting society’s continuous experiment with “fixing” troubled youth. The school would also come to loom large in the imagination of the Middletown community, and it would provide a key talking point in the conversation about incarceration in the state of Connecticut.