The Rosewood Center was an institution for people with developmental disabilities located on Rosewood Lane in Owings Mills, Maryland.
It was established in 1888 as the Asylum and Training School for the Feeble-Minded. From 1912 to 1961, it was known as the Rosewood State Training School. In 1961, the facility was renamed as the Rosewood State Hospital. After the state departments of health and mental hygiene merged in 1969, the facility was renamed the Rosewood Center. On January 15, 2008, the state of Maryland announced that Rosewood would be closed in the near future, and the center began the process of transferring residents to other facilities. It finally closed on June 30, 2009.
History
19th Century origins
In March 1888, The Maryland Legislature approved "An Act to establish and incorporate an Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded of the State of Maryland" (Chapter 183, Acts of 1888) which empowered a seventeen-member Board of Visitors to direct the selection of a site for a school which "shall receive, care for and educate all idiotic, imbecile and feeble-minded persons". Despite this sweeping command, only ten thousand dollars was appropriated for the land and buildings, with a five thousand dollar annual appropriation thereafter. The asylum was to be free of charge for all indigent children between seven and seventeen years of age, charging two hundred and fifty dollars for all other children.
Because of the inadequate housing and appropriation and the number of eligible applicants (conservatively estimated by the State Board of Health in 1884 at 1,319) the Board of Visitors had to adopt a restrictive admissions policy. Set forth by the Board in 1899, the admission policy confined itself to "those who are susceptible of a certain degree of training with the view to their being developed into a condition of utility and self-support, in other words it shall be a training school and not custodial.
Only white children between seven and seventeen years of age were admitted. Boys were taught farming, gardening and carpentry while girls learned sewing, washing, milking and horticulture, as well as training for domestic service. With these skills, it was hoped that the inmates would be self-supporting on their release at seventeen.
The training served another purpose as well, as the Board often displayed an almost obsessive desire to have the asylum be self-supporting. Much of the food was grown or raised on the surrounding farm and virtually all the clothes and table linen were made by the girls. All laundry and cleaning was done by the inmates and their labor was even used during the excavations for new buildings in 1892 and 1900. The farm continued in operation until the 1960s.
20th Century
In 1900 the Board unsuccessfully proposed the construction of a separate school for the "colored feeble-minded" and for an additional building for epileptic children. The latter hope was realized when the Thom Cottage was erected in 1896 through a private donation. Another hope was realized when in 1894 and 1907 the Maryland Legislature passed bills to transfer all insane and feeble-minded patients from county almshouses to state institutions. While this created pressure on the physical plant at Rosewood, it also ensured continued state funding.
From 1911 to 1933, 166 patients, mostly women and girls, left Rosewood under habeas corpus writs; they were subject to human trafficking, bought by the rich as indentured servants and unpaid laborers, often callously treated and often abandoned by their "carers." Leo Kanner denounced this scandal in front of the American Psychiatric Association in 1937.
In 1912 the name of the facility was changed to "Rosewood Training School", reflecting changes in professional attitudes and terminology. The school greatly expanded its capacity during the twentieth century and by 1968 had approximately 2,700 patients, a number nearly triple that of only seventeen years earlier.