I’m writing the backstory of a character, born in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, who later in life finds out that her parents’ actual first child was born (probably in 1920) with a mental disability and put in an institution. Relatives, neighbours, etc., were told that the child died. I read on TV Tropes’ Useful Notes: The Fifties that this happened in the 50s, I assume it also happened in the 20s. Is this realistic?
But the plausibility isn’t so much what I’m fussed about — I’ve been trying desperately to find out where such a child would have been institutionalized. No luck so far. So I’m hoping that someone will have some source or information regarding institutions that housed disabled children in Michigan that I can’t get with my limited resources. I’ve found plenty of information on historic institutions for the disabled, but no information on any that took infants.
Yeah, I did notice that, but I was hoping there’d be something in Michigan. I can use this if I can’t find anything else, but if there was ever something in Michigan or in a state closer to it, I was hoping to find out. Thank you.
In earlier times, a poor House would have disabled people too… providing a nursing ,educational and corrective services. But that was changed during the late 1800’s.
Thank you, but I already looked up that place and didn’t find any information about it keeping infants. Though if anyone has information saying they did, that be convenient.
Thank you, I did find that website in my searches, and I will probably end up asking them if I don’t get anything through this thread.
Oh… An orphanage makes sense. That could work. I may use that if there’s nothing else. ^^ Thank you.
Eloise would be a good bet. The Eloise cemetery (if the sibling has since died) was down the street, and to the casual viewer looks like an empty field. The graves were marked only with numbers, and burial records were lost some time after the asylum closed.
I grew up in Westland, only a couple miles from Eloise. My family has been in the area since about 1800. I had a uncle that worked there for 40 years. I also had a family member that was a charge there for many years. I believe they did take in infants, as they had wards for pretty much everybody. Probably the most numerous were the alcoholics. After about 1980, these folks were discharged, and many simply became homeless. It started as a county poor farm, for indigent. Over time that inclulded pretty much all folks with problems. It was a working farm for many years. The charges sometimes would walk away, as I found out one 4th of July - I picked up a hitchhiker on Michigan Ave, a mile west of Eliose. I thought he was a veteran, since he had a army jacket on. Then he started talking about the “majic Majicans” that were after him. I dropped him off near a party store, thta’s what he wanted. Often, the more functional guys would walk away and find day work in the area, getting money for booze. My grandparents hired one that had been a ship’s carpenter, from Denmark. My gf wouldn’t pay him until the end of the week, when the guy got money, he’d get drunk. He did great woodworking, handmade custom doors, cabinets, built in bookcases. This was in the 30’s.
When this place closed, it was about money. It was given the cover story of “mainstreaming”, but most of these folks fell thru the cracks in the outside world. But the state saved money!
They could tell in 1917. If you open the whole article, you’ll see where the doctor refused to save the day-old baby girl he said would “probably be an imbecile.” He let several newborn babies die, before his own death in 1919, in the name of eugenics.
Funny, I drive past that orphanage a lot. I never thought of it as a scary or haunted place, though the pictures sure make it look that way.
Here’s a story about it, along with quotes from still-living people who lived and worked there. I’ve read other articles as well from people who grew up in the orphanage; most of them seem to think it wasn’t that bad of a place, though it can’t have been easy to be an orphan.
Oh, and by the way, if you need something to be IN Detroit, this ain’t it. That orphanage is something like 450 miles away from Detroit. Though I guess you could take literary license and move it closer.
It probably borders on a WAG (since most of my info comes from a documentary on Broadmoor Hospital I was watching the other week), but apparently attitudes to such things tended to vary quite considerably from decade to decade. With Broadmoor at least, it constantly cycled between a beacon of rehabilitative therapy and a safe haven for those who couldn’t function (usually when a new director was put in charge and got modernising), a dumping ground for anyone the prison service wanted to rid themselves of and a glorified prison (whenever something went wrong and the rags got themselves a nice scary horror movie villain to work with).
Well, I’m not even sure they’d most likely be sent THAT far. I’m guessing it would have been an incredibly long and hard haul to get from Detroit to Marquette in the 1920s. Heck, you couldn’t even get there without taking a ferry part of the way, they didn’t have a bridge between the peninsulas until the 50s.
I am not sure how many orphanages would have been equipped to handle kids with developmental disabilities and my guess for the OP’s needs would still have been Eloise, however.
(Like a remarkable number of posters in this thread, I have a tenuous family connection: my grandfather-in-law was a pharmacist, there, and his wife worked in housekeeping.)
