In the early twentieth century, while Detroit and Michigan were rapidly forming a model public schooling system and becoming a center of industrial education, a small group of Detroit philanthropists spearheaded an entirely unique endeavor for the public good, known as the Wayne County Training School. It would grow into the world’s predominant center for research into mental deficiency and breakthroughs in the education of slow learners, and it held this position of prominence until the middle of the twentieth century when its name was changed to the Wayne County Child Development Center. Metro-Detroiters who were in their teens during the 1980s-1990s when the school sat abandoned may remember this place by its popular nickname, the “Northville Tunnels,” referring to the steam tunnels that could be explored beneath it.

          Located in Northville at the northeast corner of Five Mile and Sheldon Roads, the Wayne County Training School (WCTS) consisted of about 40 brick buildings, opened in 1925, and was designed by noted local architect Marcus Burrowes. There were school buildings, dormitories for both staff and residents, as well as residences for administrators. Northville lies in the corner of Wayne County that is both the furthest from the city, and at the highest elevation, which according to nineteenth-century medical beliefs made it the most suitable place to put a municipal tuberculosis sanatorium. Eastlawn Sanatorium and Maybury Sanatorium were both already established there by 1920. It was then thought that the hills of Northville might also be the ideal place to cloister all the asylums and prisons serving Detroit, so as to simultaneously keep these “unappealing” institutions and their inhabitants removed from the city's expanding residential neighborhoods while providing a bucolic, restorative setting for the inmates. Over the years more custodial institutions would arrive, including the Detroit House of Correction, Northville State Hospital, Hawthorn Center, and Plymouth State Home & Training School. By the 1960 Census, the number of people held in Northville’s institutions had eclipsed the town’s population.

          The WCTS however was a standout amongst its institutional brethren. At that time the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale was used to grade what was called “feeblemindedness;” in today’s terms, “intellectual disability.” People with IQ scores from 30 to 100 were classified as “feebleminded.” Unlike every other such training school in the country, the WCTS sought to help strictly juveniles scoring between 50 and 100, because they stood the greatest chance of benefitting from education. The WCTS was the first institution to scientifically limit its admissions in such a way, and by breaking the cycle of cradle-to-grave institutionalization it represented a new paradigm in mental health. Whereas other training schools merely housed the “feebleminded” irrespective of age or IQ level, WCTS was designed to give at-risk children the basic training they would need to be released back into society within one to three years. This usually meant some kind of job placement, arranged with the employer by the school while the child was still in training. Once the child demonstrated independence at that job, the parole ended. Theoretically this would curb the rate of recidivism. The key to the WCTS's fast turnover rate was early diagnosis; it was believed that the earlier “feeblemindedness” could be identified, the more likely it was that a child could benefit from education.