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This week I learned the MSU-owned land that is the site of the WKAR-TV transmitter antenna was originally purchased by the State of Michigan about a hundred years ago to be the location for a model women's prison. A (tangential) #MSUHistory thread. @MSUArchives 1/
Officially called (in a mix of optimism and euphemism) the "Michigan State Training School for Women," and colloquially as "Cedar Banks" for its riverside location, it was founded by state law in 1917. (Despite the apparent similarity in name, no direct relation to MSU.) 2/
Presumably it was intended to provide training in vocational skills as a form of rehabilitation. Yet the establishing Act had no mention of what it meant to be a "training school." (I have not been able to find anything further about that particular, significant detail.) 3/
The prison was designed to be what we might call minimum-security: for example, no bars on the windows. Inmates were to be carefully selected from the populations of other correctional facilities. 4/
The site, in the rich farmland south of Okemos, was chosen in part because its bucolic setting was hoped to "provide wholesome surroundings for the rehabilitation of wayward women." The grounds would have vegetable gardens and fruit orchards, to be tended by the inmates. 5/
The state went so far as to build a power house (for steam heat and electric lighting) and an access bridge to Dobie Road over the Red Cedar River. Also planned were three dormitory "cottages" and buildings for administration, recreation, the school, and a nursery. 6/
Yes, a nursery — children less than 12 months old could accompany their inmate mothers. Which sounds nice until we get to the ominous line in the law, "until such time as... [the child] may be properly removed therefrom and be taken care of elsewhere." 7/
Nevertheless, Cedar Banks was seen as a "wonder prison," intended to be the most advanced penal institution in the state if not the nation, and the embodiment of the latest thinking in prison reform during the late Progressive Era. 8/
Over time, though, it lost the support of the same women's groups that had first backed it. They feared it was too near to the Agricultural College campus (now MSU), that somehow it "could be extremely detrimental to developing young minds at the growing state college." 9/
(Which I find funny... at the time it was at least 4 miles from campus, and even today with modern roads it seems to be reasonably far away. That said, a straight-line measurement shows that now it's only 2 miles from the edge of the main body of MSU lands.) 10/
Anyway, by 1922 the state legislature stopped appropriations on the project. Nearly $135,000 had already been spent on land acquisition, construction, and architects' fees. About $1.65 million in today's dollars. 11/
Governor Alex J. Groesbeck tried to convince the legislature to provide more funding but could not get traction, and his successor in 1927, Fred W. Green, swiftly pulled the plug. 12/
In the 1930s a Works Progress Administration class from Michigan State College dynamited the power house smokestack. (I don't remember seeing that class in the course catalog, but sign me up!) The steel bridge across the river was also demolished as a WPA project. 13/
At some point, the state transferred the land to MSU. The TV equipment house was built 1954, drawn by noted Lansing architect Orlie Munson, designer (oft w/ Edwyn Bowd) of too many MSU sites to mention. Bowd–Munson were THE campus architects, almost exclusively, for decades. 14/
A 1965 Lansing State Journal article surveyed the leftover ruins: chunks of concrete from the powerhouse walls and the bridge abutments, dripping with with vines and moss, resembling the "remains of an ancient temple." bit.ly/2DjysRz 15/
Today the site is fenced off and access is tightly restricted. Don't bother to visit, trespassing is illegal and there's nothing to see anyway beyond some raw woodland and transmitter towers. But it's interesting to stand at a distance and imagine what almost was. 16/fin
