Montana State Training School Historic District (General Campus Exteriors)

BOULDER, MT, 59632 US / MT

Location Description

The Montana State Training School Historic District holds historical significance for its associations with the state's education, treatment, and custodial care of its citizens with disabilities. Including academic buildings, dormitories, and a resident cottage, the historic district documents the evolution of both national and state institutional and cultural attitudes toward the disabled, particularly those with cognitive impairments. Although it began as a largely educational endeavor in the late nineteenth century, the State Training School soon actively participated in national trends of mass institutionalization and sterilization through the 1960s, followed by rapid deinstitutionalization beginning in 1970. Mid-century, Dr. Philip Pallister, the school's Clinical Director, established the institution as a leader in genetic research. For these associations with education, medicine, and state treatment of individuals with disabilities, the district is eligible for listing at a local and state level of significance under Criterion A. The period of significance begins in 1912, when the school's south campus first developed, and continues through 1970, when a stark transition toward deinstitutionalization began. The district gains additional significance under Criterion C. The development of the campus over a span of fifty years is reflected in the architecture of the buildings. The district contains examples of the Italian Renaissance Revival, International, and Modernist styles. Several of the buildings are associated with Montana's premiere architects, C.S. Haire and J.G. Link. The buildings reflect not only evolving institutional demographics and strategies of care for the disabled but also shifting architectural trends. Indeed, as then Superintendent Robert Perry explained in 1971, the campus's architecture and grounds planning is a veritable museum of concepts of treatment. The Montana State Training School Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. It is a complex of buildings set around an oval green and a central administrative building named Griffin Hall. Griffin Hall was built in 1912 and is the oldest building. Many former buildings of the complex were demolished in the 1970s and 1980s.[1] It has also been known as the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, as the State School for Deaf, Blind, and Backward Children, as the Boulder River School and Hospital, and as the Montana Developmental Center, and it has been denoted by 24JF1991. It includes 13 contributing buildings, a contributing structure, and a contributing object, as well as three non-contributing sites. It is associated with architects Link & Haire and Norman J. Hamill. 105 Venture Way, Boulder, MT 59632 Hours: Open today · 8AM–4PM Phone: (406) 225-4600

Related WebLink(s)

National Register of Historic Places Listing

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