USA > New York > Wayne County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 12
USA > New York > Cayuga County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 12
USA > New York > Seneca County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 12
USA > New York > Ontario County > History of Central New York : embracing Cayuga, Seneca, Wayne, Ontario, Tompkins, Cortland, Schuyler, Yates, Chemung, Steuben, and Tioga Counties, Volume I > Part 12
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Dr. Francis J. Cheney was principal from 1891 to the time of his death in 1912. His successor was Dr. H. DeW. DeGroat who in August, 1932, completed his twentieth year in the position.
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The campus of thirty-one acres is situated near the center of the city on a hill from which the seven valleys converging at Cortland are visible. The building and grounds represent an investment of a million and a quarter of dollars.
The present enrollment of the school is 900 professional stu- dents pursuing the usual courses for preparing young people to teach in the elementary schools of the state and also a special course for those preparing to become directors of physical edu- cation. The classes in physical education that have graduated from Cortland since 1926 have furnished one sixth of the physical directors now working in the public schools of New York State outside of Greater New York.
CHAPTER XII
STATE INSTITUTIONS.
ANCIENT AUBURN PRISON AND ITS WOMEN'S PRISON-ELMIRA REFORMATORY- WILLARD STATE HOSPITAL-NEWARK STATE SCHOOL-BATH VETERANS' HOME-STATE SANITORIUM.
No region of equal area in the state boasts so many state in- stitutions within its limits as do the Central New York counties. In capital investment and in the total number of patients, or inmates these institutions bulk larger than those of any district of the same size. Millions yearly are spent in the maintenance and improvement of these institutions. In their administration some of the greatest experts in their line in the country are em- ployed. And the fame of many of the state corrective, research or welfare centers is nation-wide. Federal aid is supplied to some of the institutions.
AUBURN PRISON.
When Auburn was a village of 200 houses with 1,000 in- habitants, there came into being in the little Cayuga County community an institution which is known today on every con- tinent-Auburn prison, oldest in New York State and for more than a century a laboratory for experiments in penology. The village itself was incorporated but a year before the prison was started. It was only a year before the construction began that the community was so small its sidewalks were mere slabs thrown down in summer and consumed for fuel in winter.
When the need for such an institution was seen, back in 1816, citizens of Auburn offered to donate a site and John H. Beach swung sufficient votes in the Legislature to bring the in- stitution to Auburn, despite concerted competition elsewhere.
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Because Auburn was then a Democratic stronghold, it received recognition. Construction of the main building with its en- closure and the outside wall of massive limestone was completed to a height of four feet in 1816. The following year first convicts were received and were employed in further building.
In the southeast corner of the prison wall today is embedded a bottle of whiskey put there June 28, 1816, by a workman. Every builder in Auburn was engaged in construction work the first year, so that accommodations within twelve months were provided for the first fifty-three convicts received. In 1818 there were eighty-seven more arrivals. About this time the first women prisoners came and were lodged in a large room in the south wing.
At the start there were sixty-one double cells and twenty-eight rooms holding from ten to twelve men each. Insubordination ruled. Beatings were frequent. But association with civilian laborers gave convicts encouragement. For infraction of rules, inmates were whipped. A village blacksmith was engaged to do the flogging. But once when he left the prison the village popu- lace set upon him, tarred and feathered him and rode him from town on a rail.
Conditions gave rise to a virtual reign of terror. Fear re- sulted in formation of the Auburn Guard, armed and equipped by the state and with an armory in an upper story of a stone building within the walls. When the north wing burned in 1820, this guard marched the convicts to their cells at bayonet points and extinguished the blaze.
William Britten, first warden, designed the solitary cells which replaced the compartments, the first of their kind in the world. Britten soon died and his successor, Capt. Elam Lynds, a veteran of the War of 1812, executed his plans. He also lib- erally used the cat-o'-nine-tails, a rawhide whip. During his administration some convicts died of abuse and others committed suicide. Lynds was forced to resign and was once indicted for "beating, bruising, wounding and ill treating" convicts and for "causing to be withheld from them a quantity of food necessary to their health and comfort." He classified convicts into three
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groups. The first included the most dangerous. These were de- nied the solace of labor and doomed to constant confinement in silent, solitary cells. Separation of these men took place Christ- mas Day, 1821, when eighty were thus isolated. In less than a year five of the eighty-one had died, one had become an idiot and another hurled himself from the gallery into the yard below. The remainder, haggard, despairing, begged piteously to be set to work. Soon after Lynds was removed but returned in 1838, reversing humane methods prevailing in his absence.
Lynds then fed prisoners in their cells, without knives or forks. One strangled on a piece of meat. Despite petitions signed by 800 townspeople for his second removal, Lynds stayed. A cruelty indictment was quashed. But there then came an event which induced the warden to resign. Louis von Eck, a physician, suddenly died April 8, 1839, in the prison hospital. It was revealed that he had consumption and was unable to work, but had been repeatedly flogged on the ground he was shamming illness. Lynds introduced the lockstep, discarded twenty-five years ago. In 1847 the cat-o'-nine-tails went too. But five years before an Auburn physician had invented the punitive shower bath, in which a convict was fastened in stocks and a deluge of cold water turned on him from two feet above.
Four years after the first convicts arrived, contract labor was inaugurated, with tool, copper, tailor, machine, hame and cabinet shops. After a little over twenty-five years, contract labor was stopped and the state went into its own prison manu- facturing enterprises.
It was in Auburn prison that the world's first electric chair claimed a human victim on August 8, 1890, when William Kemm- ler, Buffalo woman slayer, was executed and the news flashed to two continents to arouse the press against what was termed a "disgrace to our common humanity." Electrical companies opposed the chair, lest the death current fear in the public re- tard sale of their generators. Before all state executions were transferred to Sing Sing in 1916, electrocutions in Auburn to- taled fifty-seven. Among the victims of the Auburn chair were Czolgosz, assassin of President Mckinley; Chester Gillette, made
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famous in Theodore Dreiser's book, "The American Tragedy," and Mrs. Mary Farmer, first woman ever electrocuted in the state.
Within Auburn's walls, the "Auburn System" was evolved -- the plan by which prisoners work together in shop or field in silence to return at night to individual cells. During more than a century the leather paddle, the striped suit, close cropped hair, lockstep, yoke, ball and chain and other implements of punish- ment have passed. In 1913 the late Thomas Mott Osborne of Auburn, after a week's voluntary incarceration to study condi- tions, inaugurated the Mutual Welfare League for convict self- government. But the league self-government passed with the bloody riots of 1929.
Indicative of the age of Auburn prison is the fact that be- fore the telegraphs, railroads, or even the Erie Canal, a company of Auburn convicts were marched afoot across the state to the lower Hudson to aid in building Sing Sing prison. And in that venerable history, Auburn prison never had more lurid days than in 1929, when two riots shocked the nation, caused hundreds of thousands of dollars damage, cost many lives and resulted in an improvement program in which the state has since poured millions of dollars into the ancient prison.
The first outbreak started shortly after noon on July 28, 1929, and by the time the insurgents had been herded into their cells at night, a half million dollars loss had been sustained in the burning of the shops, four desperadoes had escaped over the walls, two convicts had been killed in the rain of bullets, five guards had been shot or otherwise injured and six city firemen were likewise casualties. The slain convicts, struck by stray bullets were George Wright, a robber of Erie County, and Joseph Cirrogone, a fire bug. Guards shot were Milton J. Ryther, Eu- gene Fasce, William E. Dempsey and Merle K. Osborne, while Thomas J. Wallace was clubbed.
Firemen wounded or injured in falls were Capt. Patrick F. Morrissey, Lieut. George Searing, Michael Walsh, William Kehoe, Charles Lavey and Patrick Brennan.
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That rebellion, however, was but a practice session for the second on December 11, which lasted most of the day, leaving eight convicts and Principal Keeper George Durnford shot to death and many guards seriously wounded or gassed. This break occurred in the morning when a group of convicts, after the murder of the P. K., had secured Warden Edgar S. Jennings and for two hours held him hostage, with threat to kill unless autos were provided for them and they were released.
By a ruse the rebels, mostly lifers and other long termers, were enticed with their warden hostage and several captive guards, into the front corridor. There police and state troopers, with guards, ambushed them in a gas bomb barrage. The con- victs, most of them armed, fired and retreated to the cell blocks, where in a last stand they were shot down. The hostages were badly wounded in the melee. Warden Jennings was gassed along with Guards Milton Ryther and Volney J. Ellis, prison school master. The wounded included Keepers J. Fred Van- Housen, George E. Atkins, L. Albert Holzhauer, John Burton, Leo McDermott, Trooper William Stephenson and Convicts Max Becker and Claude Udwin.
Becker was later acquitted on a charge of shooting down the principal keeper. Udwin, William Force and Jesse Thomas, con- victs, were convicted and executed at Sing Sing for the killing of William Sullivan, an inmate riot leader slain in the melee with troopers, police and guards. Three other convicts among the rioters were acquitted in Sullivan's murder. Convicts slain in- cluded Perry Johnson, Alexander Huckolka, Steve Pawlak, Stephen Sporney, Luke J. Bonnell, James B. Biancrassi, James Pavesi and Sullivan.
Remodeling of Auburn prison began in 1928, with the start of erection of a new shop building for manufacture of auto plates, brooms, cloth, baskets and a machine shop. Since that time about five million dollars has been spent on the prison, or at the rate of more than a million a year. The shop building was finished in 1930, a laundry building begun in that year was fin- ished in 1931. In the same period a new south cell block costing a million dollars went up, with 610 cells. By buying two and a
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half acres in Wall and Water streets, the prison grounds were extended in 1929 and a new wall built on the south, west and north sides at the lower end of the yard at a cost of another million dollars. This placed twenty-two and a half acres inside the walls. In 1931 the new north cell block, power house, mess hall, kitchen, foundry and wood working shops, storehouse and lumber sheds were started and all will be completed this year. The north cell block has 460 cells, making a total of 1,070 new cells, in addition to the 1,281 old cells, which will be removed and replaced by new and larger ones. Today the force of guards numbers 211.
PRISON FOR WOMEN.
Hardly less interesting than that of the men's prison at Au- burn is that of the women, which is scheduled to pass in 1932 as an institution, the population being transferred to the new peni- tentiary for women at Bedford Hills. For years Auburn has had the only prison for women in the state, sixty cities and the countryside between having sent their transgressors there.
Originally the women's prison was completed February 2, 1859, as the world's first criminal insane asylum. It was in 1893, three years after the coming of the electric chair to the men's institution, that the asylum gave place to a women's prison, the lunatics being transferred to the new State Hospital at Mattewan.
The fate of the old stone pile, 294 feet long and sixty feet deep at the center, is unknown. Indications are it will be razed. Because it was once an insane hospital, the women were never kept in dungeon like cells. Rooms eight by ten feet in size have formed the horizon for those whom the state segregated from society. A tennis court, a greenhouse, pleasant walks inside the walls all added to make as cheerful as possible this repository for all the state's abandoned women who fell afoul of the law. Into the granite Big House have been women who took love too seriously and the law too lightly, women who killed husband or lover or children for money or passion or jealousy; college grad- úates, char women-colored, yellow, white-bearing unborn
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children or merely hate of society; girls of 'teen age to doddering old women. And at the time the prison passed forever from Auburn, forty per cent of the inmates were confined for murder.
ELMIRA REFORMATORY.
In 1869 New York State enacted a law authorizing estab- lishment of an institution for male felons between the ages of sixteen and thirty, not previously convicted of any crime punish- able by imprisonment in a state prison. The institution was located at Elmira, Chemung County, and went under the name New York State's Reformatory at Elmira, later changed to El- mira Reformatory. The age limit for inmates was also changed on July 1, 1931, so the institution receives only criminals from sixteen to twenty-five years old.
First inmates came to Elmira in July, 1876, and in January, 1877, the population numbered 164. Today the reformatory has 1,440 cells and is filled. Inmate labor was used to hasten com- pletion of the various buildings and in 1878 the institution was finished. Z. A. Brockway was first superintendent serving from 1875 to 1900. Other superintendents were: Frank P. Robert- son, 1900-1903; Joseph F. Scott, 1903-1911; P. J. McDonnell, 1911-1917; Dr. Frank L. Christian, 1917 -.
The reformatory is in charge of the superintendent and his executive staff includes an assistant superintendent, a chief clerk, a steward, a physician, an assistant physician, three chap- lains, a director of the School of Letters, a director of the School in Trades, a disciplinary officer, an instructor in military and a chief engineer.
This year a modern new school building for the School of Letters is being erected and when finished, will be occupied by a new all-day school schedule. At present inmates attend school for about an hour and a half a day, excepting Saturdays and Sundays. In this school subjects include arithmetic, bookkeep- ing, language, history, ethics, civics, literature, economics and hygiene. There are eight primary grades and an academic class, as well as one for mentally retarded and those who do not know the English language.
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In addition is a Trades School, with each class in charge of a citizen instructor. Here these trades are taught: Barber, book- binder, bricklayer, cabinet maker, plumber, auto mechanic, car- penter, printer, clothing cutter, shoemaker, machinist, electrician, steamfitter, moulder, hardwood finisher, stenographer, painter, horseshoer, tailor, sign painter, iron forger, tinsmith, plasterer, machine woodworker, upholsterer.
The Military Department is under direction of a citizen in- structor, as commanding officer or colonel of the inmate mili- tary organization known as the Reformatory Regiment. Prac- tically all prisoners are permitted and required to avail them- selves of the advantages of this training. A citizen major is in command of each battalion and a citizen captain of each com- pany. All officers below the rank of captain are inmates.
After a youth has completed at least six months of satis- factory progress in the institution, his case is brought before the Board of Classification, which determines how long a term he must complete before being eligible for release on parole. When he has completed the time prescribed by this board, he must ap- pear before the State Board of Parole, which may at once au- thorize his release on parole or continued incarceration. The Parole Board took up this work for the first time July 1, 1930. The institutional management has nothing to do with releasing an inmate on parole.
The reformatory newspaper, The Summary, is the oldest newspaper of its kind in America. It is of, by and for prison inmates, who have full control of publication, except that prison officers are censors.
A fine new hospital building will be completed before 1933 and the State Legislature has appropriated a considerable amount for remodeling Cell Blocks A and B. This work will begin in 1932. The entire aim at Elmira is to reform, not to punish.
WILLARD STATE HOSPITAL.
A miniature city for the mentally ill, a community covering 1,302 acres, of which 822 are cultivated, with its real estate
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valued at $3,171,859 and its personal property at $290,694; a little city with its own heating plants, its own farms and its own manufacturies-that is Willard State Hospital, at one time the largest institution in the world of its kind. Located at Willard, Seneca County, overlooking the broad expanse of Seneca Lake, this state hospital, opened as a state institution in 1869, is one of the finest in America.
For the year ending July 1, 1931, there were under treat- ment at Willard 1,609 men and 1,626 women, or a total of 3,235 patients. Their care was looked after by a staff of fifteen physi- cians, 322 ward employes and 293 other officers and employes. During that year alone $474,158 was spent upon building im- provements and the value of the institution's farm and garden products is estimated in that year as $93,567. In Willard's in- dustrial departments the past year articles valued at $28,000 were manufactured and thousands more repaired. Brooms, brushes, floor polishers, door mats, harness, mattresses, pillows, shoes, slippers, leather goods, caps, suits, shirts, overalls, sur- gical coats, uniforms, dresses, shirts, slips, waists, towels, sheets, tablecloths, pillow slips, curtains, etc., were turned out by hands ungoverned by normal minds.
The history of Willard is as striking as its present plant is impressive in size and efficiency. There was a state agricultural college, established in 1852 with 400 acres of land, on which the hospital buildings now stand. The Utica Asylum was opened in 1843 for care of those afflicted with acute and presumably recoverable psychoses, but no provision was made for the poor and indigent insane of the chronic class, who were chiefly in almshouses. Throughout the state lunatics, whose families were unable to support them at state or private asylums, were hud- dled together in the poorhouses of various counties. They were exposed to neglect, frequently to extremes of cold and hunger, and sometimes to brutality; thus mild lunacy often became rav- ing madness.
For years the need of reform had been urged upon the legis- lative committees by Dr. Sylvester Willard of Albany. His toil was in vain. Then one day as he was pleading for better care
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of the insane, Dr. Willard fell dead before the committee hear- ing him. His tragic death caught the ear of sympathy. The state provided funds for the institution which was named after the man who gave his life in its humanitarian cause. The old agricultural college gave place to the asylum. A building com- mission was appointed and Dr. John B. Chapin, then of Canan- daigua, became chairman.
The congregate or associate dining rooms at the various cot- tage groups on the institution's property, designed by Dr. Chapin, were the first in this country and had a capacity of 140 each. The asylum was opened October 12, 1869, with Dr. Chapin as superintendent, a position he filled until 1884. By that date all buildings were completed except the men's infirmary, which was constructed during the administration of Dr. P. M. Wise, who resigned in 1889. Dr. Pilgrim was appointed February 1, 1890, who served three years before being succeeded by Dr. Theodore H. Kellogg. Dr. Mabon succeeded him, but resigned within less than a year to give place to Doctor Macy, who in turn was followed by the present superintendent.
In 1890 the state passed an act providing for state care of all insane, when the status of Willard was changed and it became a unit in the state hospital system. The word hospital was then substituted for asylum and Willard received acute as well as chronic cases thereafter.
Since those early days, Willard State Hospital has been en- tirely transformed, the state pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into its improvement. Last year alone the expenditure for maintenance was $1,085,216, or at an estimated yearly cost of $432.03 per capita. For several years the rated capacity of the hospital has been 2,091. The new reception hospital, con- struction of which was started in February, 1929, and com- pleted in March, 1931, provides additional accommodation for 152 patients, bringing the capacity to 2,243 or 1,104 men and 1,139 women.
Mental clinics have been conducted monthly by the hospital staff in Ithaca, Geneva, Auburn, Hornell and Corning. Under the state laws of 1927 institutional districts were established
$1150
Keuka Colleg
KEUKA COLLEGE, KEUKA, N. Y.
HAGEMAN HALL, KEUKA COLLEGE
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HISTORY OF CENTRAL NEW YORK
throughout the state in the Willard district including the counties of Allegany, Cayuga, Onondaga, Ontario, Schuyler, Seneca, Steu- ben, Tompkins, Wayne and Yates.
NEWARK STATE SCHOOL.
No more interesting state institution is located in Central New York than the Newark State School, at Newark, Wayne County, where over 1,200 girls early in 1932 were receiving care, along mental, physical and moral lines. The year 1932 saw the introduction of boys, too, to the school.
The institution was an outgrowth of the State Asylum for Idiots in Syracuse. Dr. H. B. Wilbur, first superintendent of Newark school, was head of the Syracuse asylum in 1851. Con- ditions were so crowded that as an overflow measure a building that would house 100 inmates was leased in Newark and C. C. Warner was appointed to take charge. The asylum was fitted up and made ready for occupancy before the first of August, 1878. It opened September 2 with twenty girls, which number was increased to ninety by the end of the year. The original appropriation was $18,000 to cover rent and other costs for the first year. The institution continued as a branch one from Syra- cuse until July 1, 1885, when the Custodial Asylum for Feeble- minded Women at Newark began its separate existence. C. C. Warner, who had been in charge under Dr. Wilbur in Syracuse, was chosen superintendent.
The school was for women of child bearing age and not until 1920 were children from five years upward received. At the start there were but four and a half acres of land. From this humble beginning the institution has grown until in 1931, when the last annual report was made there was an acreage of 116.28, all owned by the state. The value of real estate totaled $2,067,- 365 and the personal property was valued at $179,250.54. That single year $437,532.92 was spent for new construction and per- manent improvements. The year's maintenance costs reached $427,786.29 and the articles manufactured by the patients were valued at $14,157.
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In addition to girls in the school there are seven colony homes. Before girls go to these, they must reach certain class standards, particularly in the domestic arts department, to qualify them for taking on domestic work in the villages where the colonies are located. The first of these colonies was opened at Geneseo March 6, 1923, with a capacity of twenty-one girls. On January 1, 1927, the colony at Penn Yan was opened with fifteen girls and July 26 a similar colony was started at Lyons for seventeen. A Newark colony for twenty-three girls was opened November 20, 1930, a second colony was opened later at Penn Yan and an- other at Canandaigua. The last colony was established in 1932 at Watkins Glen in the three story, twenty-five room Magee house overlooking Seneca Lake, where sixty girls can be accom- modated.
In the colonies the girls get away from institutional life and fit themselves for parole. If their conduct is good, they are treated in summer to a two weeks vacation at Lake Bluff Hotel at Sodus Bay on Lake Ontario, which is rented by the state for recreational uses. The last report shows ninety-six parole girls, 106 colony girls and 360 girls from the school enjoyed vacations there. On September 14, 1931, a group of Camp Fire Girls was organized at the school, and later a group of juniors or Blue Birds.
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