Ohio History Journal

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ROBERT M

ROBERT M. MENNEL

 

"The Family System of Common

Farmers": The Early Years of

Ohio's Reform Farm, 1858-1884

 

 

In late January 1858, the Hocking Cottage, the first family

building of the Ohio Reform Farm, was pronounced "perfectly dry"

and ready for occupancy. Soon thereafter, Acting Commissioner

(Superintendent) Charles Reemelin escorted the first inmates, nine

of the "better disposed" boys from the Cincinnati House of Refuge,

to the Lancaster institution.1 The school proposed to reform

juvenile delinquents by teaching them farming skills and providing

moral and common school education in a family setting under the

supervision of specially chosen "elder brothers". Though a pioneer

of its kind in America, the Reform Farm was conceived in the image

of European reformatory philanthropy, particularly Frederic A.

DeMetz's Mettray (founded 1839), a French agricultural colony that

drew admiring visitors from many countries. A lithograph of Met-

tray, displayed at Lancaster, testified to this debt and to a brief

study of European institutions undertaken by Reemelin in 1857.

An earlier article in this journal examining the ideological origins

of the Reform Farm has shown that, while Mettray provided

organizing techniques, the pedagogy of reform school education in

Ohio was distinctively American.2 Like the initiators of the state's

first municipal reform school, the Cincinnati House of Refuge

(1850), the founders of the State Reform Farm-the most prominent

being Charles Reemelin, Salmon P. Chase, and John A. Foot-were

white Protestant males who had come from New England or Ger-

many and rapidly established their economic and political status

 

Robert M. Mennel is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.

He wishes to thank the American Philosophical Society, the Charles Warren Center

for Studies in American History, and the Central University Research Fund of the

University of New Hampshire for research support in the preparation of this article.

 

1. Ohio. Executive Documents, I (1858), 277; Ibid., (1856), 618.

2. Robert M. Mennel, " 'The Family System of Common Farmers': The Origins of

Ohio's Reform Farm 1840-1858," Ohio History, LXXXIX (Spring, 1980), 125-156.