Owatonna's State Orphanage: Ten Thousand Children

Just west of Interstate Thirty-Five near Owatonna stands a campus that spent sixty years as the state of Minnesota's answer to a hard question: what do you do with children nobody wants?

Before eighteen eighty-six, the answer was grim. Orphaned, neglected, and abused children were placed in county poorhouses alongside adults living with addiction, mental illness, and poverty. State reformers in the eighteen eighties pushed for something better, and the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children opened on this campus to give it a try.

The school was built on what reformers called the cottage system, a model that had emerged in Europe as an alternative to the old asylum. Instead of warehousing children in large institutional dormitories, the campus was arranged as a small village of cottages, each housing a group of children under the care of a house mother. The idea was to simulate family life as closely as a state institution could manage. Educators called it the Brace method, after the New York reformer Charles Loring Brace, who had argued that children needed homes, not prisons.

Between eighteen eighty-six and nineteen forty-seven, more than ten thousand six hundred children passed through this campus. The school served as a placement and adoption agency as well as a residence. Many children stayed only months before being placed with farm families across the region. Others grew up here, educated on-site and discharged at adulthood with little more than the clothes they wore.

The school closed in nineteen forty-seven as foster care and private adoption gradually replaced institutional placement. The surviving original buildings were transferred to the city of Owatonna and now house city offices. A portion survives as the Minnesota State Public School Orphanage Museum, one of the most intact examples of a cottage-model child welfare campus remaining in the United States.