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The Vineland Training School was founded in 1887 in the Millville home of Steven Olin Garrison. Garrison, a Methodist minister, had two developmentally disabled siblings. His family had long been pushing to get the state to open an asylum to research and treat children who are born in such a way. Vineland philanthropist B.D. Maxham heard of his mission and donated the Scarborough mansion and 40 acres along Landis Ave. to Garrison the following year.
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| Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive |
The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble Minded Children, later renamed the Training School at Vineland, was the very first instition for the developmentally disabled in the state. Those living at the school learned various vocations as well as farming, and lived in small cottages rather than the large, linear plan institutions like Trenton and Greystone state hospitals. The Training School at Vineland was one of the earliest "cottage plan" aslums in the country. It influenced different institutions all over the country including the seperately ran Vineland State School. That facility opened across the street from the training school one year later.
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| Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive |
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| Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive |
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| Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive |
The campus continued to expand, with more cottages being built in 1892 onward. As the facilility grew, Steven Garrison began to fall ill. Recognizing the need for a contingency plan for the school, he began the search for his successor. The man he chose was Professor Edward Johnstone, who at the time was the Principal of Instruction at the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth. Steven Garrison passed away at the age of 46 on April 17th, 1900.
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| Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive |
One of the first major decisions Edward Johnstone made was choosing a new director of research. Henry H. Goddard was chosen for the position in 1906. Goddard was a professor working at the Pennsylvania State Normal School. Despite the somewhat jarring and institutional name, a normal school is essentially a university for teachers. This position gave Goddard a large amount of influence and credibility. Now, at the Vineland School, he was in charge of the first research laboratory for intellectual disability in the united states.
Goddard was a fervent eugenecist, believing that those with developmental disabilities should be segregated from the general population and advised to not reproduce. In 1908 he introduced the IQ test to America, having translated and reformatted the Binet Intellegence Scale to English for the first time. This was done after thorough testing on the population at the training school. Two years later he would coin the term "Moron", and introduce it into clinical use to describe those with an IQ of 59 to 70. He dubbed those with an IQ of 26 to 50 as "imbeciles" and those who landed between 0 and 25 "idiots". All of these groups, as he believed, should be weeded out of the gene pool for the betterment of society as whole.
In 1913 a seperate farm colony of the training school was formed on a acre plot of land southwest of the main campus, but still within city limits. The campus was constucted using the labor of those who would go on to live on the property. The new campus was dubbed "The Menantico Colony".
At the same time, Henry Goddard began an "intellegence testing" program at the isolation hospital on Ellis Island. The end result of the testing determined that up to 80% of the steerage-class immigrants coming to this country were "feeble minded". Surprisingly this xenophobic arrogance didn't completely discredit him, it actually seems to have led to him getting a better job.
Goddard left Vineland in 1918, one year after his Ellis Island findings were published. He went on to become the Director of the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research. His work was eventually largely discredited, but not before his influence made significant and long lasting changes to the landscape of psychology, and the lives of millions.
Stanley Porteus, an Australian immigrant, took over Goddard's position as Director of Research. As much as I love the fact that an immigrant took over a xenophobe's job, Porteus was quite problematic himself. He held stong beliefs about caucasion people being intellectually superior to all other races.
Porteus served for six years before moving on himself, which brought psychologist Edgar Arnold Doll to Vineland. Doll is best known for developing the Vineland Social Maturity Scale in 1935. The scale measures social function, and is still widely used by psychologists.
Despite the hopeful and noble purpose with which the Training School was founded, conditions and care at the facility began to decline. Federal funding towards research was being shifted away from private institutions, removing one of the pillars that had held up the school. The cottages on the campus were deteriorating, and the exterior fire escapes mandated by new building codes left the students vulnerable to unauthorized entry.
This came to a head in 1979 when a deaf child was mutilated and murdered inside his cottage. Police completely ignored reports of a tall blonde stranger who had been seen around and even inside the cottage on several occasions. Three fellow students were blamed for the murder, two 15 year olds and an 18 year old boy. The families and several staff members objected to the charges, as they were all harmless and not physically capable of causing the injuries to the deceased boy. The boys also said they saw the previously described tall blond man inside the cottage when they came upon the body. These reports went nowhere, and as far as many people are concerned the murder was never solved. The boys who were blamed never ended up facing any formal punishment. Two of them even continued to live at the training school.
The following year, two reporters from the local newspaper "The Record" went undercover at the instition to try and see how things really operated. Valerie James and Henry Golman exposed multiple instances of physical and sexual assault on students, as well as a prevalent cover-up culture. Multiple members of the administration ended up being arrested after the exposé, including the president of the school at the time, William Smith. James and Goldman ended up winning well deserved awards for their work. The act likely influenced Governor Richard Cody to do a similar undercover investigation at Marlboro state hospital a few years later.
The future was uncertain for the school at this point. The state of New Jersey was about to step in and and shut the facility down when a private organization named Elwyn announced they were going to take over
in 1981. Elwyn's main mission was to depopulate these institutions and reintegrate their students into society through group homes. One of their first major missions was to clean up the decrepit Vineland facility. They began moving students out of the aging cottages and tearing them down. By the early 1990s they began building new group homes on the campus itself, the first construction the property had seen in nearly 100 years. The remaining cottages were vacated and kept around for storage.
The now depopulated Vineland Campus was put up for sale in 2022. By this point all of the remaining cottages were boarded up and in severe disrepair. They were all demolished, in an effort to make the campus easier to market. The only historic buildings that managed to survive were the old Scarborough mansion and the "New School", which became an apartment building. As sad as it is to see the important campus bare, the facility had become outdated, and simply was not able to offer the students the level of care and comfort that they deserved. Even though the buildings are mostly gone, the story of the Vineland Training School will go on to serve as an important reminder that providing the best care means learning and evolving over time. Who knows what the next big breakthough will be? All I know is I hope I can be there to help tell the story.
Thanks for learning with me everybody.
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