Lancaster Industrial School for Girls

Lancaster Industrial School for Girls
Nearest city Lancaster, Massachusetts
Coordinates 42°26′35″N 71°39′30″W / 42.44306°N 71.65833°W / 42.44306; -71.65833Coordinates: 42°26′35″N 71°39′30″W / 42.44306°N 71.65833°W / 42.44306; -71.65833
Built 1790
Architect Unknown
Architectural style Italianate, Federal
NRHP Reference # 76000301 [1]
Added to NRHP October 8, 1976

The Lancaster Industrial School for Girls was a reform school in Lancaster, Massachusetts. It was the country's first state reform school for girls, opening on August 26, 1856. The facility provided its charges with separate rooms, arranged in three-story cottages with kitchen, dining, and other public facilities on the ground floor, rooms for the girls and a housemother on the second, and space for teachers on the third floor.[2] This school paved the way of social reform, moving away from child imprisonment towards a correctional paradigm. This was in part achieved because of the observed benefits of environmental change in children, as well as the importance of education plus the added pressures of having to deal with the rise in child delinquency brought by social changes of the industrial age.

After its closure in 1975, it was redeveloped into Massachusetts Correctional Institution - Lancaster. The campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.[1]

See also

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lancaster Industrial School for Girls.
  1. 1 2 National Park Service (2008-04-15). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
  2. ↑ "Lancaster Industrial School for Girls". National Park Service. Retrieved 2014-03-31.


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