An eclectic group of artists, historians, writers and officials gathered to revive the legacies of teens buried in the late 1800s and early 1900s on the grounds of what is now a men’s prison, some interred with their infants.
Over the past century, towering red cedars have watched over a hidden cluster of narrow, aging gravestones in upstate New York — a buzzing cicada or the occasional groundskeeper among the few visitors.
But something unexpected happened Monday in this wooded cemetery for girls and infants, tucked on the sprawling property of what is now a men’s prison. Mourners gathered to leave white roses on more than a dozen long-neglected and unadorned graves of teens sent away to be locked up, often for minor transgressions.
Dozens of attendees listened to speeches, prayer and verse, and watched an interpretive dance to honor the young people. Generations ago, they were cast off and incarcerated, maligned under obscure statutes defining them as “incorrigible” for behavior viewed as inexcusable at the time, such as “sexual transgressions.” Many were sent from around the state to the small town of Hudson for being a victim of their parents’ abuse.
The assembled fanned themselves and wore wide floppy hats against the biting sun, as the ceremony marked its urgent mission “to restore dignity to those buried in the cemetery, and raise awareness about the historical treatment of incarcerated girls and women,” said organizer Alison Cornyn. The New York City-based artist has spent the past decade researching and documenting the lives of the so-called “incorrigible girls” whose remains can be found on the site that now houses the Hudson Correctional Facility for men.
“This ceremony is the first step in a larger program to research and memorialize these women and babies,” Cornyn told the audience, explaining her work together with many of the attendees. She described it as “a crucial step in acknowledging a painful chapter in our history, and working towards healing.”
The splotched limestone markers on the prison grounds are barely knee-high. They all lack dates and epitaphs, and a few aren’t even marked with a name. But researchers have confirmed the deceased were residents of New York’s House of Refuge for young women, which opened in 1887 and mostly served those under age 21. Some were held at a facility that replaced the House of Refuge on the rural expanse in 1904, the New York State Training School for girls 15 and younger.
Nobody is certain exactly how many are buried at the site. But Lizzie French, Nellie McGovern, Anna Schabesberger and Julia Coon are named on the stones. So are Mary O’Brien, Louella Roarack, Lydia Althauser and Jennie Fuller. They lie alongside Anne Withey, Helen Peer and Barbara Decker.
In remarks to the crowd, book author and former New York Times journalist Nina Bernstein shared those names and other details of the heartbreaking stories she has unearthed in the archives. Records indicate some died of diseases like tuberculosis, typhus or syphilis. Some girls died in childbirth after being incarcerated, and were later buried alongside their infants. Others may have been killed while running away, she added, noting fearful stories that spread among the incarcerated girls — that if they got caught running away, they wouldn’t make it out alive, and their remains would not be sent home.
The Hudson mayor, local judges, prison officials, artists, dancers, historians, students and former residents of the training school gathered Monday to honor the deceased of the facilities as “foremothers.”
“By uncovering this difficult history, we hope to spark important conversations about how society can better support young women today,” said Cynthia Boykin, who grew up in the nearby city of Newburgh. Boykin was sent to the Hudson “training school” for girls in 1972, after a court deemed her a “person in need of supervision.”
To date, much of this history has been held only by survivors. Kamal Johnson, the mayor of Hudson, described being stunned by what he saw and learned at Monday’s memorial service.
“I had no clue this was down here. So when we came in, we actually got lost,” Johnson said. “When you hear there’s a grave site, you don’t really know what to picture in your head.”
Once he arrived, Johnson said he could feel the weight of the place and envision the stories behind each headstone — particularly as a Black man with incarcerated family members. “We’re not talking about women who did the most heinous of things,” he remarked. “We’re talking about some of the most petty crimes.”
The New York State Training School for Girls and the House of Refuge were once two of the largest facilities of their kind, housing an estimated 15,000 girls and women until the training school’s closure in 1975. That school had 500 mostly teenaged girls at once, a magnitude that drew researchers, policymakers, journalists and photographers from around the world. Ella Fitzgerald was once a resident. The facilities’ open, leafy environment and boarding school-style management became examples of Progressive Era reforms, laying the foundation for the modern fields of social work and juvenile justice.
The dark past haunted the present, however. In 1937, the year before the last known burial in the cemetery, the school marked a new superintendent’s arrival with “a bonfire of restraining sheets, straitjackets and prison-made shoes,” The New York Times reported. In the 1950s, a prominent watchdog journalist still found heavy reliance on punitive isolation, racial discrimination by staff and a chronic lack of psychiatrists.
One of the speakers on Monday, the author Ona Gritz, said she was 7 years old in 1970, when her now-deceased older sister Andrea “Angie” Boggs was sent away to Hudson. It was a chapter of her childhood that lay dormant for much of her life.
“It was pretty convincing as a boarding school,” Gritz recalled in her visit to the site this week. But after Angie died violently in the 1980s, Gritz said, “it took me another 30 years until I felt courageous enough to try to understand her story,” including her time at the school.
Gritz’s genre-defying memoir “Everywhere I Look,” published in April by Apprentice House Press, describes her 10-year search for answers about what happened to her sister — “a girl that nobody was protecting.”
Feminist scholars who have reviewed the records of girls’ facilities in New York in the early 20th century describe them as oppressive. The punishment of being sent away landed on young women who became pregnant “out of wedlock,” and even those accused of flirting too much. Hudson’s training school also became an early civil rights battleground, drawing scrutiny for segregating Black and white children for decades.
Most recently, the state has been the target of lawsuits, for allegations of staff sexual abuse against vulnerable residents at the Hudson training school the years before its closure.
Monday’s memorial to honor the deceased emerged from a “confluence of synchronistic events,” organizer Cornyn said.
The journalist Bernstein first immortalized the Hudson cemetery in her acclaimed 2001 book about the child welfare system, “Lost Children of Wilder.” In it she describes a 13-year-old girl sent to the training facility in 1973, who stumbles onto the eerie, overgrown site with tilted gravestones during a runaway attempt.
Reading a passage Monday, Bernstein noted that “even after death, runaways were punished. This was their solitary confinement: a cold, dark grave lost in the woods forever.”
Cornyn — who credited Monday’s event to Bernstein’s reporting — began her own archival and artistic work in 2011, after seeing the contents of a box that a thrift store owner shared with her. The box contained personal records of inmates that are typically buried in state archives. But these precious documents ended up in a garage sale.
Cornyn’s organization, Incorrigibles, grew out of another project she co-founded, Prison Public Memory, and has received funding for research, art exhibitions and events from Humanities New York, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, among others.
“What drove me initially was the girls in the box. My sense was that they wanted their stories known, and there were so many stories to uncover and share,” Cornyn said. “Institutions like this, you usually only hear the official bureaucratic version — the history is written by the agency, not the people who were there.”
To date, the public has had limited access to the cemetery because it sits on the vast, grassy property of what is now the medium-security men’s prison. The shrouded nook sits atop a steep ravine, just across from the facility’s massive barbed wire enclosures.
A state prison system official described Monday’s event as an important part of the work to properly memorialize the deceased.
“Somebody’s final resting place should be a place of gracious relief, rest, and a place where family members can come and spend time with them, and celebrate memories,” said Megan Galioto, director of ministerial services for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. “So that’s hopefully what we can offer you today: The knowledge that despite the hardships that your loved ones and friends and family members may have had to endure, we’re here and we remember them, and we promise we’ll continue to take care of them.”
