*from author Marla Rose (not her real name, or rather a shortened version for the internet)
What a small resting place in a subdivision says about our past and why it’s a cautionary tale for the future.
On Sunday, I was feeling that familiar invigoration I can always rely on in early autumn, as the leaves are just on the verge of changing and households start displaying their Halloween decorations. I convinced my son and husband that we should drive out to Geneva, IL, a quaint, verdant river town in the western suburbs of Chicago, about 45-minutes west of us. We trek out here a few times a year to take in the riverwalk, enjoy the boutiques, and breathe in the fresh air. On Sunday, I got that urge again and my guys were on board so we charged our phones, packed our drinks, and set out. Just before we left, thank goodness, I remembered that there was a place there that I wanted to see in person, one that had not been on our itinerary before.
It was the tiny cemetery of 51 graves on what was once part of the 94-acre property of the Illinois State Training School (ISTS), also known as the State Industrial School for Delinquent Girls or the Illinois State Training School for Delinquent Girls (among other appellations), which was in operation from 1894 until 1977 (Moj here: 1977 FFS). Just outside the gates of the now-demolished institution you fill find this small cemetery, improbably nestled between and behind two large homes in an affluent subdivision called Fox Run.
I had heard of the cemetery before here and there and seen some photos of the spare, old gravestones. I also knew that the cemetery was in an unlikely setting but that didn’t stop me from wondering if our GPS had failed us as we drove around cul-de-sacs and saw children riding their bikes and walking dogs in a decidedly residential setting. When my maps program said we had arrived and we were, in fact, between two large, manicured lawns, I stepped out to look around but I was doubtful. Where would it be? After walking around a bit more, I saw the iron fence and called out for my husband and son, still in the car, to join me.
Somehow or another, this was it.
We walked over to the fence, first passing a plaque, which reads, “Beginning in 1894, this land was used by various government agencies as a center for ‘wayward girls’. The colonial-style cottages, service buildings and fences are gone, but these 51 graves remain. These graves are a testimony that they are no longer wayward but home with their Creator.” The plaque ends simply: “May God’s peace be with their souls.”
The first thing I noticed after walking through the gate was how uniform the simple concrete markers were, bringing to mind photos I have seen of the rough gravestones for the Civil War dead. The next thing I noticed before I began looking at the stones was a tall, utterly majestic oak tree, her branches offering a quiet green canopy for us, over much of the cemetery. The acorns crunched under our shoes, the only sound in the cemetery.
At first when I saw gravestones with boys’ names, I was confused because I knew this was an institution for girls, but then I noticed how long they were alive: these markers were for babies or newborns, and are clustered together in one section of the cemetery. Other gravestones, possibly for their mothers, are buried near one another in another section; these gravestones indicate that age 20 is about the oldest of the dead, which makes sense as ISTS was an institution specifically for minors, ranging in age from as young as ten, to the age of eighteen, although some were younger and many were a little older. Most had been sent because they were suspected of being sexually active or were pregnant; later research found that more than seventy-four percent of inmates were incarcerated at ISTS, which could house up to 400 girls at a time, for reasons of “immorality,” the unspoken code for pregnancy, sexual precociousness or suspected sex work. As the plaque at the cemetery references, they were “wayward” girls, wayward enough to have been convicted in juvenile court.
In the mental and physical examination records I later researched, it was noted that some were disobedient, others were described as feeble-minded, which could mean anything from a speech impediment to being terrified of their interrogators. Some were deemed to be incorrigible. Some were found have unpredictable mood swings. Some there had been convicted of truancy. Some were labeled as sexual deviants, a code for lesbians or even non-virgins. Many were runaways from abusive homes. Most were willful. All had been found guilty of violating society’s norms for girls. All of these young children were poor.
Middle class and wealthy girls who ran afoul of societal norms weren’t given a free pass, but they weren’t sent to institutions like this one.
I have no doubt that some of the girls incarcerated at ISTS over its eighty-plus year history were indeed mentally ill, or genuinely needed help, but that was not what the institution or even society offered at the time. Ophelia L. Amigh, a one-time Civil War nurse who was superintendent of the institution for 16 years, ruled with an iron fist until she was ousted due to vaguely-worded controversies in 1910. To reinforce the obedience to the matrons, girls deemed rebellious or sexually active with each other were sent to the hole (solitary confinement), subjected to “hydrotherapy,” which meant having their bodies repeatedly dunked in cold water; there were well-worn straps and a riding crop, as well as a chair built by the institution’s carpenter, much like a stock from the Puritan days, where the person in it only were able to have their head poking out. They lived in small cells with just a cot and a barred window; I call them inmates intentionally.
Many committed to ISTS ran away and were returned; many ran away and were never found. Some like 20-year-old Sadie Cooksey died by electrocution on the third rail of the nearby railroad line as they attempted to flee.
There is also the unavoidable cautionary tale of this burial ground. All were indigent, all were society’s outcasts, most were teenagers or babies. Some were Black and kept in segregated cottages, others were mentally ill and abused. All were prisoners without resources or recourse, and there were some for whom this hellhole was an actual step up from the abuse they faced at home.
While the institution has been bulldozed and an affluent subdivision has been planted over it, and the cemetery certainly looks like something from a bygone era, is the ISTS really just a sad old chapter of our history? With many mostly red states legislating more control over the bodies of pregnant people, with the prevalent attitude in conservative circles that if a woman “just kept her legs closed,” she wouldn’t be in this kind of trouble, with the rightwing mentality of coercion and cruelty against those outside their circle of concern, is it really that far in the past? With each eroding step away of the painfully slow and hard-fought gains we have made as a society for people with uteruses, for people with mental illness, for people of color, I couldn’t help but see this frozen-in-time cemetery as a quite plausible reality for our future. This is the ‘rosy’ past to which forced-birthers want to return.
In 2023, pregnant people in red states are endangered and at growing risk of dying in labor, hemorrhaging, contracting serious infections and being forced to carry non-viable fetuses to term even if it costs them their own health or lives due to laws that would be perfectly at home when the School for Wayward Girls was constructed and running (it was only four years after Roe v. Wade was enacted that the institution closed.) Today’s “wayward girls” have to travel in secrecy to other states, whether or not they can afford it, to terminate their pregnancies. They are told to wait in hospital parking lots until they are on the brink of death with blood loss before they can get the medical attention they deserve. Today, people in states where abortion is outlawed who want or need to end their pregnancies, and those coming to their aid, have a dangerous and fraught landscape to navigate, one that is becoming more and more reminiscent of the Underground Railroad than anyone should be comfortable accepting.
What would the residents of this cemetery, the girls who were never afforded basic freedoms and rights, think about how much progress we have made, only to have these freedoms and rights wrenched away, eroded, reversed? I can only imagine how sad these girls — victims of a bigoted, unjust and sexist society — would be at learning of our country’s regression, driven by a relative few tyrannical ideologues, putting so many disadvantaged women and girls at risk. I think if we can do anything to honor these girls and their babies, we need to strive to be on the right side of history, and if we find ourselves on the side of cruelty, coercion, and oppression, we must course correct as fast and as fully we can.
We have to recognize that the cemetery at the Illinois State Training School is not an aberration but a reminder of happens when rights are denied and the lives of our most vulnerable — people of color, people with disabilities, people who are poor, LGBTQ people, people who have had their reproductive systems weaponized against them — are most threatened. Please join the fight for bodily autonomy and personal rights. Anyone who denies rights and freedoms, who values fetuses over actual human beings here on Earth, is squarely on the wrong side of history.
And to the buried dead of the Illinois State Training School, you are seen. I see you. We see you, we are fighting for you and we will not forget you. We are also fighting for ourselves and each other.
