By RUSS IMMARIGEON
STARTING ABOUT 1903, the New York City-based Women’s Prison Association, which has thrived now for 180 years since its founding in 1845, initiated a 10-year campaign to establish a farming-centered prison for women in Valatie.
Nowadays, surrounded by overgrown trees at the edge of Volunteers Park, two long empty two-story buildings, each facing the other, have served little apparent purpose. Originally, however, between 1913 and 1918, these buildings were the first two of what was meant to be 27 buildings that would confine New York State’s entire women’s prison population, which was then incarcerated downstate in New York City and upstate in Auburn and Buffalo.
In August 1911, The Hudson Evening Star reported preliminary New York State plans for a “detention home and a reformatory” for women on a 319-acre site once consisting of two family farms.
In that article, state prison superintendent Colonel Joseph F. Scott, based in Albany, and Alice Woodbridge, of the Women’s Prison Association, pledged to start constructing the first two of an expected 16 additional two-story fireproof brick and roof-tiled cottages and a reception center for women entering the institution. Approximately $50,000 was available for this work, with Scott and Woodbridge hoping for subsequent legislative funding to complete the project.
State Architect Franklin B. Ware was assigned to design each of the cottages to hold over two-dozen women with the longer-term objective, at that point in the planning, of housing up to 500 women convicted of at least five misdemeanor charges within a two-year period prior to each woman’s confinement.
According to a Chatham Courier article in November 1912, these Spanish mission-style cottages were constructed with hollow tile, steel, and concrete. Wooden floor boards were placed over concrete floors. Wood was also used for doors and windows. On the first floor of these cottages would be matron and warden offices, a public parlor, a shower bath, and toilet, guard and utility rooms, as well as a dining room, kitchen, and pantry. Each basement would have a laundry and steam-heating plant. Second-floor rooms in each building would house 25 women and as many as five guards.
In addition to the cottages, the site was intended to contain an administrative building, two workhouses, two farm buildings, a chapel, and a hospital, as well as heating, water supply, and waste disposal plants.
“The women who are sent to this farm,” the article ended, “will be employed in the fields and at other outdoor work. It is probable that trees for state reforestation will be raised there,” noted the Hudson Evening Register.
No accounts have surfaced that tell the experiences and stories of the women held at the State Farm for Women. In its five-year life-span, a 2015 article from the New York Academy of Medicine reports, there were, overall, 146 women incarcerated there.
When actually opened, the cottages were meant to house young women between the ages of 18 and 30. In practice, however, the white or native-born women sent to Valatie were typically convicted of drunkenness and were between the ages of 30 and 60.
Plans for the State Farm for Women, long uncertain, initially argued for male wardens, but two of the three wardens were women.
The State Farm for Women was never the beneficiary of adequate state funding for its grander intentions and it closed in 1918. Upon closing, the women housed in its quarters were all paroled to their home communities, and the buildings were quickly handed over to the New York State Health Department for the treatment of women with syphilis or other venereal diseases. Subsequently, the Volunteers Park buildings have been used for mental health care, senior activities, and even town offices.
“The State Farm was a poorly conceived, badly planned, and inadequately financed institution,” concluded the late criminologist Nicole Hahn Rafter in her mid-1970s history of women in state prisons from 1800 to 1935. “The original concept of the State Farm as a prison where female misdemeanants could be held indefinitely was, in fact, the reductor ad absurdism of Progressive Era idealism, for it completely disregarded the principle of proportionality and naively assumed that the state could afford to incarcerate harmless offenders for lengthy periods.”
Today, all women serving New York State prison terms are housed mainly at two maximum- and medium-security Bedford Hills prisons in Westchester County and one Albion prison in Orleans County in western New York. Women are also incarcerated across the state at local county jails, including the Columbia County Jail.
Officially closed about a decade ago, these buildings are now empty and in escalating disrepair. Kinderhook officials have no immediate plans for the future of these buildings.
(The buildings and the land around it were recently separated from the park and the Town Board is negotiating a sale of property to the Valatie Rescue Squad. – ED)
