Please take the time to visit our sister project, Incorrigibles. The Prison Public Memory Project started out working with communities to unearth the history of local prisons, to imagine what...
> Read More
Nina Bernstein and the ‘mystery’ of Shirley Wilder
In the mid-1990’s, while researching her first book, Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (Pantheon, 2001), New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein went to Hudson, NY. There she discovered a treasure...
> Read More
> Read More
Will You Take a Summer Time Trip with Me to the New York State Training School for Girls, Hudson, NY?
Sue Tenerowicz of Hudson, NY shared her grandmother, Bessie Butt’s, photo albums with the Prison Public Memory Project. The first 20 or so pages (before those depicting Boonesville where she was...
> Read More
> Read More
Who Is Training Whom?
The Prison Public Memory Project recently received a note from Frances Drabick, a poet whose mother worked at the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, NY in...
> Read More
> Read More
Black Child Savers Along the Hudson
By Geoff K. Ward When Dr. M. E. Ross’s yacht pulled into the Hudson, NY harbor in July of 1936, few likely realized that it carried something other than an...
> Read More
> Read More
The “Ungovernable” Ella Fitzgerald
By Russ Immarigeon On April 10, 1933, according to records at the New York State Archives, Westchester County judge George W. Smyth sentenced a fifteen-year-old “colored” girl named Ella Fitzgerald...
> Read More
> Read More
The Training School For Girls: Punishment or Protection?
In November 1905, Minnie B. Wade, a parole agent for the newly established New York State Training School for Girls located in Hudson, NY, addressed participants at the Sixth Annual...
> Read More
> Read More
Where is Margo Bake?
According to this undated article from Newsday, a newspaper based in Long Island, NY, ‘Missing Person’ Margo Bake, ran away from the NYS Training School for Girls in 1949. She...
> Read More
> Read More
If These Walls Could Talk: Life in a Girls’ Prison
Please join the Prison Public Memory Project and Historic Hudson for “IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK…” an exploration of life inside the New York State Training School for Girls (1904-1975) in...
> Read More
> Read More
Delinquent Girls Need to Farm
Fannie French Morse became Superintendent of the New York State Training School for Girls in 1923 and shortly thereafter she began stirring things up. Morse was an advocate of reform,...
> Read More
> Read More
Gloria Hollenbeck’s Memories
Unable to attend our Story and Photo Share at the Hudson Area Library on November 18, 2013, yet wanting to share her memories and photographs, Gloria Hollenbeck had an envelope delivered to the Library adressed to...
> Read More
> Read More
Suffer Little Children
Marion Palfi (1907 – 1978), an immigrant photographer and member of the New York Photo League, a pivotal organization in photography and U.S. history, took photographs of girls at the...
> Read More
> Read More