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          During the period of the WCTS's inception, roughly 1900 to 1929, Detroit was the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. It was also the fourth largest in population size, ³¹  and was made up of a remarkably high percentage of immigrant serfs from overseas, and ruralites moving in from the farms and mining ranges of Michigan. As a result, a comparatively poorly-educated and increasingly “feebleminded” segment of the population was rapidly growing in Wayne County, and with the economic hardships of the Great Depression and other smaller panics throughout the early years of the century, more of the juveniles of this class of people were crossing paths with the legal system. The need for an institution to deal specifically with incorrigible youths was clear. The traditional houses of custodianship such as the Detroit House of Correction, Eloise Asylum, and the Lapeer State Home were becoming so crowded that they were having problems functioning effectively or even humanely. WCTS lifted a significant amount of the caseload off of those institutions to begin converting their inmates into productive members of society, and save them from a life of stagnation as tax burdens in a dead-end institution. The Lapeer State Home was currently the most suitable place to which children of this mental frame could be sent. However it had an extremely long waiting list for admission and many of those on it were not from Lapeer County, or even greater Michigan; they were inner-city residents of Wayne County. ³²

State Home at Lapeer

          The call for a local institution was raised, not only for the benefit of the residents of Wayne County, but also to relieve rural Michigan taxpayers of having to fund care for residents that were mostly coming from one specific urban area. Local Detroit humanitarians formulated their own response to the matter based on the surprising and singular opinion that the issue of juvenile delinquency due to feeblemindedness was a problem belonging to the specific metropolitan area where it arose, due to the failure of its public school district in being able to successfully engage this class of children. Therefore, the duty to remediate it fell upon the local government, they believed. Luckily for the lofty ideals of WCTS's founders, Wayne County at that time was “in better financial condition than any similar fiscal unit in the United States,” ³³  and there was a rapidly expanding base of newly wealthy, forward-thinking middle class citizens paying taxes.

          This is what makes the WCTS unique; it was not founded by state mandate like all other training schools across the nation—it was founded despite the state. Neither was it a privately funded and operated institution. The idea was presented to county government by concerned citizens, and ultimately funded by two $1 million bond issues approved by the county voters, the first by a margin of almost two to one. ³⁴