The WCTS was conceived during a time when Detroit’s urban population was exploding, and juvenile delinquency was on the rise, resulting in overcrowded jails. In the Progressive Era, there was also more attention being paid to the rise of problems in mental health; the WCTS was founded as a response to overcrowding in the Lapeer State Home by six key Detroit figures: Milton Alexander, Tracy McGregor, Frank Cody, William H. Maybury, Henry Hulbert, and Eber Yost.

          The idea was proposed to the Wayne County Supervisors by these concerned philanthropists, and ultimately funded by two $1 million bond issues approved by the county voters. Though many training schools existed in America, none was ever conceived by voter referendum, nor has another county ever operated its own training school. It was a boldly progressive move on the part of Wayne County, which arrested the attention of the mental health community for decades.

          The training program of the WCTS was essentially the same as the typical manual school, in that vocational trades were taught alongside remedial academic learning, while simultaneously insulating the child from the temptations of the streets. This basic operational theory had in fact been espoused in Michigan since at least the early 1870s when the State Public School at Coldwater was founded. It has even been asserted that the idea of a “manual training school” was first conceived around 1809 by patriarchal Detroiter Fr. Gabriel Richard, “teaching the children of the frontier to use their hands,” and to read, by making their own textbooks when he brought the first printing press into the Michigan Territory. In its heyday, WCTS graduates were said to have been highly sought-after in certain fields of employment. , However, the WCTS came to represent something an order of magnitude more profound—its founders made a strong research component part of the WCTS program, to pry into the causes of mental deficiency and find possible treatments.