Franklin, Robert. “New Vision for Sauk Centre’s Old Reform School: Owners Think Campus Ideal for College or Business.” Star Tribune, 13 Jan. 2002, p. 1B.
Hollingsworth, Heather. “Girls Reformatory Leaves Legacy of Hurt, Haven.” NBC News, 24 Oct. 2009, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/33461470/ns/us_news-life/t/girls-reformatory-leaves-legacy- hurt-haven.
Khazan, Olga. “Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health.” The Atlantic, 16 Oct. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/trauma-inherited-generations/573055.
Maccabee, Paul. “Alias Kid Cann.” Mpls. St. Paul, vol. 19, no. 11, Nov. 1991, pp. 88-91.
Serres, Chris. “Jailed, Abused for No Crime.” Star Tribune, 7 Aug. 2016, p. 1A.
We Knew Who We Were: Memories of the Minneapolis Jewish North Side. Directed by Thomas F. Lieberman, The Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest and The North Side Committee, 2008.
Yager, Sarah. “Prison Born.” The Atlantic, July/Aug. 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/prison-born/395297.
Zollman, Bryan. “Abandoned Souls? Questions Linger About History of Brookdale Cemetery.” Sauk Centre Herald, 19 June 2013.
JOURNAL ARTICLES, DISSERTATIONS, AND THESES
Kinzelman, Cara Armida. A Certain Kind of Girl: Social Workers and the Creation of the Pathological Unwed Mother, 1918–1940. 2013. U of Minnesota, PhD dissertation.
Kremer, Gary R., and Linda Rea Gibbens. “The Missouri Home for Negro Girls: The 1930s.” American Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 1983, pp. 77–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40641775.
Leavitt, Sarah A. Neglected, Vagrant, and Viciously Inclined: The Girls of the Connecticut Industrial School, 1867–1917. 1992. Wesleyan U, BA thesis. https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= 1388&context=etd_hon_theses.
Myers, Tamara, and Joan Sangster. “Retorts, Runaways and Riots: Patterns of Resistance in Canadian Reform Schools for Girls, 1930–60.” Journal of Social History, vol. 34, no. 3, Spring 2001, pp. 669–697. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/jsh.2001.0025.
Pasko, Lisa. “Damaged Daughters: The History of Girls’ Sexuality and the Juvenile Justice System.” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, vol. 100, no. 3, Summer 2010, pp. 1099–1130. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25766116.
Rosenthal, Marguerite G. “Reforming the Juvenile Correctional Institution: Efforts of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in the 1930s.” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 14, no. 4, Dec. 1987, pp. 47–74.
Rowe, Leroy M. “A Grave Injustice: Institutional Terror at the State Industrial Home for Negro Girls and the Paradox of Juvenile Delinquent Reform in Missouri, 1888–1960.” 2006. U of Missouri, Columbia, MA Thesis.
Tannenbaum, Nili, and Michael Reisch. “From Charitable Volunteers to Architects of Social Welfare: A Brief History of Social Work.” Ongoing Magazine, U of Michigan School of Social Work, Fall 2001, pp. 6–11, https://ssw.umich.edu/about/history/brief-history-of-social-work.
ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS
Minnesota Historical Society
Prison Memory Project
Sauk Centre History Museum and Research Center
Stearns History Museum
Permissions
Page 78, “Morse Hall.” Used with permission of Stearns County History Museum.
Page 97, “A Group of Girls Outside Pioneer Cottage.” Used with permission of Stearns History Museum.
Page 102, “Mother Daughter Puzzle.” Photograph by Bob Armstrong. Wooden puzzle circa 1909. Restored by and in the collection of Bob Armstrong and displayed at: www.oldpuzzles.com. Used with permission of Bob Armstrong.
Page 138, “Babies at Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre.” Used with permission of the Sauk Centre History Museum and Research Center.
Page 146, “View at Home School for Girls Sauk Centre, Minnesota.” Used with permission of Minnesota Historical Society.
Page 160, “Girls Working in the Field.” Used with permission of Stearns History Museum.
Page 243, Lines from “Beautiful Delores Multiple Heartbreak Ended in a Broadway Tragedy,” Minneapolis Tribune, February 16, 1936. Usage licensed by the Associated Press: Copyrighted 1936. Associated Press. 279279:0619PF.
Page 249, “Mother and Child at Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre.” Used with permission of Sauk Centre History Museum and Research Center.
Acknowledgments
It’s a daunting task to thank all who have made this work possible over the past decade.
First and most importantly, thank you to my daughter, Mikaela, who believed in this book from the beginning and waited every day to hear the words I wrote. First listener. First believer. This book belongs to you. Thank you to my son, Dylan, for countless conversations on art and life and V. Thank you to my husband, Tim, true champion of my every book—thirty years and six books later, I’m grateful you’re still here. Gratitude to Martin Case, loyal friend and fellow writer; to Kate Shuknecht and Lacey Buchda, my first-rate editorial assistants; and to my generous early readers: Maureen Gibbon, Rachel Moritz, Josie Sigler Sibara, Callie Cardamon, Susan Wolter Nettell, Meghan Maloney-Vinz, and Nico Taranovsky. To all my friends who have listened and urged me forward, thank you. You know who you are; you have my heart.
A huge debt is owed to the Osborne Association who set out across America in 1937 to document juvenile detention facilities and whose reports made the veracity of V’s story possible. Their contributions to America’s knowledge of juvenile detention facilities at the time is immeasurable, as are their contributions to this book. More than eighty years beyond that first report, they are still working for justice. Thank you to Joan McDonald for her report, A History of the Minnesota Home School 1911–1976 published by the Minnesota Home School Citizens Committee, and to Cara Armida Kinzelman for her dissertation, A Certain Kind of Girl: Social Workers and the Creation of the Pathological Unwed Mother, 1918–1940. Thank you to Sharon Sandeen, Ben Welter, and James Shiffer for answering my many questions. And to all the writers, scholars, and activists, past and present, committed to justice for incarcerated girls, I thank you.
My appreciation to the Sauk Centre Historical Museum and Research Center, and the people of Sauk Centre who have been especially helpful: Matt and Erin Bjork, Pam Borgmann, and former staff from the school who shared poems and stories of the girls. A special thank you to Eagle’s Healing Nest for transforming the former Minnesota Home School for Girls into a place committed to healing the invisible wounds of war for veterans, and to Chair/Director Melony Butler, for granting us permission to both visit and film the grounds. For research support at Hamline University, thank you to librarians Siobhan Dizio and Amy Sheehan.
Thank you to Robert Hedin for making possible the work of so many artists and writers, and to The Anderson Center at Tower View for giving me uninterrupted writing time and space to bring this book to completion. I am also grateful to the Studium at the College of St. Benedict for the silent days to work. Immense gratitude to Minnesota State Arts Board for not one, but two Artist Initiative grants to bring this story into the world despite real obstacles, and for believing with me that this history of Minnesota girls should matter to us all. Without their support, this book would still be a dream. Thank you to Andrea Smith, extraordinary librarian at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee, for the opportunities to share my work, and thank you to the women there for the work they’ve shared with me. A note of thanks to historian Bill Millikan, for telling me all those years ago where my mother’s records could be found, and to the Minnesota Historical Society for holding the archives from the Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre. A huge thank you to Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, my brilliant, ambitious editors at Rose Metal Press for their deep commitment to writing that exists outside the boundaries and for their careful attention to craft; I’m proud to be among their writers.
Most significantly, I am indebt
ed to my mother for her indomitable spirit, her remarkable refusal to conform, and for raising me to both see, and speak against, the oppression of girls and women, and to fight for gender justice. Thank you to my beloved grandparents, Howard and Dorothy, for giving us a home and family, and for providing a model of infinite, unconditional love. And to that talented young girl who brought my mother into being, for that sacrifice and so much more, I thank you now.
About the Author
Sheila O’Connor is the author of six award-winning novels for adults and young people. Her books include Where No Gods Came, winner of the Minnesota Book Award and the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, and Sparrow Road, winner of the International Reading Award. Her novels have been included on Best Books of the Year lists by Booklist, VOYA, Book Page, and the Chicago Public Library, among others. O’Connor received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her work across genres has been recognized with the Loft Literary Center’s McKnight Fellowship, two Bush Artist Fellowships, and several Artist Initiative grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she serves as fiction editor for Water~Stone Review. Learn more at www.sheilaoconnor.com.
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