Cabarrus Youth Development Center (Formerly Stonewall Jackson Youth Development Center) is a juvenile correctional facility of the
North Carolina Department of Public Safety
The North Carolina Department of Public Safety (NCDPS) is an umbrella agency that carries out many of the state's Law enforcement agency, law enforcement, emergency response and homeland security functions. The department was created in 1977 as th ...
Concord
Concord may refer to:
Meaning "agreement"
* Harmony, in music
* Agreement (linguistics), a change in the form of a word depending on grammatical features of other words
Arts and media
* ''Concord'' (video game), a defunct 2024 first-person sh ...
.
The historic Stonewall Jackson Manual Training and Industrial School was established by an act of the state legislature in 1907 and opened in 1909 as the first juvenile detention facility in
North Carolina
North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...
. The school was named for Confederate General
Stonewall Jackson
Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson (January 21, 1824 – May 10, 1863) was a Confederate general and military officer who served during the American Civil War. He played a prominent role in nearly all military engagements in the eastern the ...
. The institution is located three miles (5 km) from
Concord
Concord may refer to:
Meaning "agreement"
* Harmony, in music
* Agreement (linguistics), a change in the form of a word depending on grammatical features of other words
Arts and media
* ''Concord'' (video game), a defunct 2024 first-person sh ...
. Walter Thompson was the first principal. Originally encompassing , the campus is , of which are still used, with 5 buildings on the property. As of 2018–19, the Youth Development Center had 107 residents and the Juvenile Detention Center had 26, with full-time equivalent staff of 257.
Due to the school's pioneering status and the quality of several of its early buildings, the Stonewall Jackson Training School Historic District has been listed on the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...
. This designation includes 71 acres and 50 buildings.
It was previously operated by the
Women's Christian Temperance Union
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is an international temperance organization. It was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far ...
United Daughters of the Confederacy
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, a ...
(UDC) also participated in campaigning strongly to raise funds and influence the legislature. When the King's Daughters promised to name the school after General Stonewall Jackson, many Confederate veterans in the legislature finally approved the project, which was authorized in 1907. As a sign of their influence, four women were named to the board of the school.
Boys were generally incarcerated for relatively minor scrapes with the law, including school truancy.
At the school, the young men lived in a series of dormitory style buildings, and received an academic education as well as learning a trade. Students worked in industries including shoemaking, printing, barbering, textiles, and a machine shop. Many of the young men worked on the school's farm, learning modern agricultural techniques, and maintaining the fields and cattle herds that supported the school. The print shop produced a small newspaper called ''The Uplift''."Stonewall Jackson Training School" North Carolina Historical Marker Program, accessed 8 Jan 2009
Both white and
African-American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...
women's groups pressed the legislature for similar facilities for white girls, and for African American boys and girls. Such facilities were not constructed for several years: the first, for white girls, was built in 1918 in Moore County and called Samarcand.
Post-World War II
In 1948 as part of continuing statewide efforts to limit "feeblemindedness" and improve the population, the Stonewall Jackson Training School was the site of
sterilization
Sterilization may refer to:
* Sterilization (microbiology), killing or inactivation of micro-organisms
* Soil steam sterilization, a farming technique that sterilizes soil with steam in open fields or greenhouses
* Sterilization (medicine) render ...
by
vasectomy
Vasectomy is an elective surgical procedure that results in male sterilization, often as a means of permanent contraception. During the procedure, the male vasa deferentia are cut and tied or sealed so as to prevent sperm from entering into ...
of six teenage white males, in operations authorized by the state
Eugenics
Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes by inhibiting the fer ...
Board. Most sterilizations were performed on girls and women rather than boys or men. North Carolina was one of the last states that continued to perform sterilizations on people under state care.
During the decades of its existence, the School was criticized for abuses common in many detention facilities, such as overcrowding and prisoner violence. At its peak the facility held about 500 youths. At times there were inhumane conditions in which youths were attacked and raped by other inmates. Prison activist Russell Smith stated he suffered such attacks there when imprisoned in the 1960s from age 13–15. As an adult (and after time in state and federal prisons), Smith became an activist against prison violence, founding both the National Gay Prisoners Coalition (NGPC) and, in 1980, People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons (POSRIP).
In the 1970s, ideas about treating youths changed, and they were seldom incarcerated for offenses as minor as delinquency. The state reduced the population at the facility. The size of the campus had been reduced earlier when the extensive agricultural program was dropped. Later called the Stonewall Jackson Youth Development Facility, it was used for serious offenders involved in drug abuse and weapons-related charges. About 150 young men were generally held there. Sixty acres of the facility were enclosed by a -high fence.
Starting in 1992 the center had a
Pet Therapy
Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is an alternative or complementary type of therapy that includes the use of animals in a treatment. The goal of this animal-assisted intervention is to improve a patient's social, emotional, or cognitive functioning ...
Program, in which youth learned to care for dogs. Animals were sometimes made available for adoption outside the center.
Architectural historian Peter Kaplan, speaking to a 2014 meeting of the Historic Cabarrus Association, called the historic campus "which I understand is now completely vacant ... a remarkable collection of Colonial Revival buildings and one of Cabarrus County’s most impressive architectural groupings."
As of 2015 23 of the 60 structures were used, and most of them were used for storage purposes.
As of 2019, the Stonewall Jackson Youth Development Center served "at-risk youth", allowing them to attend high school or receive a
GED
Ged or GED may refer to:
Places
* Ged, Louisiana, an unincorporated community in the United States
* Ged, a village in Bichiwara Tehsil, Dungarpur District, Rajasthan, India
* Delaware Coastal Airport, in Delaware, US, callsign GED
People
* Ged B ...
. In 2020, the center was renamed Cabarrus Youth Development Center.
In 2020, North Carolina State SenatorPaul Newton sponsored a bill transferring the historic campus to
Cabarrus County
Cabarrus County ( )Talk Like a Tarheel , from the North Carolina ...
along with Frank Liske Park, which was a farm used by the school and became a park in 1979, leased to the county since then. Demolition of the historic buildings would cost $3.8 million but selling the buildings increases the chance for preservation. This bill has become law.