The ghosts of Geneva’s ‘home for wayward girls’

“I ’m going to jump out the window and run away tonight,” one teenage girl confessed to another. It was May 20, 1903. In a collection of stone cottages 50 miles west of Chicago, approximately 500 girls, ages ten to 20, were baking bread, washing laundry, and doing what they could to avoid the cruel attention of their superintendent. After spending the last two years of her life incarcerated at the compound, one of the girls was getting ready to run for her freedom.

Geneva History Museum records say she was Annie or Anna, and her last name was either When, Wren, Wehnn, or Weheen. In a news account published days later, the Geneva Republican called her “Anna Weheen, a Chicago girl.” I don’t know for certain her name or what she looked like, but I do know that beneath Anna’s window lilacs bloomed. Normally, this window—like all those of the cottages that housed the incarcerated girls—was crossed with locked iron bars, but a repairman happened to be doing some work. That morning, when she cautiously checked the bars, they were unlocked.

At 5:30 PM, according to the Republican, Anna went to her room, shut her door, and blocked it with her bed and table. When a worker who was coming by to lock the bars of all the girls’ windows couldn’t get in, she alerted superintendent Ophelia Amigh, who hurriedly demanded a carpenter take down the door. But before the carpenter could succeed, Anna opened the window, pushed the bars, and jumped. 

Read about the author’s journey to reporting this story: “Note from a writer: a preface to our feature story on Geneva’s youth prison”

The place from which Anna was so desperate to escape was the Illinois State Training School for Girls in Geneva, a far west suburb of Chicago. During its years of operation from 1894 to 1977, it went by many names: the State Home for Juvenile Female Offenders, the Illinois State Training School for Girls, and then, during its few years as a coed institution, the Illinois Youth Center in Geneva. All these names are euphemisms for what it was: the state’s first and only girl’s prison, and then, briefly, the first coed youth prison in Illinois.

Historical records and personal accounts show that the girls were incarcerated for truancy, theft, assault, or murder; running away from home or being orphans; engaging in street-based sex work; having an intellectual disability or mental illness; being sexually active with men or boys; being queer; being sexually assaulted or alleging someone sexually assaulted them; or being homeless, pregnant, single, or too poor to find shelter anywhere else. Girls were also sent to Geneva for being accused of any of the above, even falsely, or for in any other way breaking laws or social norms meant to uphold the political ideals of good, white womanhood.

After several attempts at reform during its history, Geneva was closed in 1977, and the property was sold to a private developer. A cul-de-sac of early-2000s McMansions now exists where the institution used to be. At its end, the prison was composed of cottages, a bakery, a beauty parlor, a solitary confinement unit, a Catholic church, a Protestant church, and a hospital. All that’s left is a cemetery, which marks the subdivision’s southernmost end. Inside its chain-link perimeter are 51 headstones for girls—and their infants—who died at Geneva. A plaque declares that in death, the girls buried there are “no longer wayward.”

Thousands of girls, the majority from Chicago and Cook County, were incarcerated here during Geneva’s reign. I don’t know how many tried, like Anna, to run away, or how many of them successfully evaded recapture, but newspaper archives throughout the decades are dotted with their stories. In addition to the cemetery, the Geneva institution was bound by train tracks and the Fox River, both of which served as guides out for incarcerated teens. Later, runaways hitchhiked along nearby state and county highways, taking their chances with strangers rather than stay at Geneva one day longer.

When Anna Weheen landed in the lilac bush 20 feet below her window, she broke her femur. It took her two days to die in the institution’s hospital, where she also demonstrated signs of internal injuries. But after an examination, the coroner determined Anna’s primary cause of death was pneumonia. “A Coroner’s jury . . . could only ex-onerate the faculty,” the Republican article assured the reader, “as the members were in no manner at fault for the girl’s injury or death.” 

Having finished with Anna’s autopsy results, the rest of the article devoted itself to a postmortem of her character. Anna was “not normal, a degenerate, had a violent temper and [was] the victim of bad habits.” Her injuries weren’t caused by a publicly funded institution where mere existence was such a horror that a teenager felt the need to run away or die trying; rather, they occurred because Anna was “fleshy” and her weight broke her bones. Her mother had a “bad” reputation, and her father took little interest in his daughter. Anna was Jewish, noted the article, as were both her parents. The only quote in the story was from superintendent Amigh, who said, “This girl was the worst one to handle and the most unpromising of any ever brought to the institution.” What the writer and Amigh didn’t mention was that Anna, whatever and whoever she was, was brave: to test the bars, to confide in another girl, and to snatch some of her agency back. 

Like many others, Anna was buried in the cemetery that remains on the institution’s grounds.

A school, a jail, an asylum, a home. For a place built to contain, study, and label the young people in it to an exact degree, Geneva was notably dependent on euphemism. Each new name reflects an attempt at reform. When it opened its doors in December 1893 in Chicago, the State Home for Juvenile Female Offenders existed because of a new belief that children should not be tried in adult courts or held in adult jails. A year later, the institution was moved to Geneva; at this time, it was also called a “home for wayward girls.” (According to a 1978 lecture given at the Geneva History Museum by former Geneva employee Nancy Vulkacic,  “wayward,” when used in the late 19th century, signified a runaway, truant, orphaned, and/or promiscuous girl.) In 1901, after reports of runaways and rumors of physical punishment broke into local news coverage, Geneva was renamed the Illinois State Training School for Girls at Geneva to “emphasise its new rehabilitative focus.” After several decades of lurid headlines about riots, suicides, queer love affairs, and murder, the institution went coed in an attempt to make youth incarceration feel more “normal” and decrease recidivism by integrating genders. From 1971 until its closure in 1977, it was known as the Illinois Youth Center in Geneva.

At its close, Geneva was run by the Juvenile Division of the Illinois Department of Corrections (now its own department, the Department of Juvenile Justice), but for about 60 years—the majority of the institution’s existence—it was housed under the Department of Public Welfare. This is not just a clue to how the girls were understood by people in power at the time—impoverished, disabled, and/or criminal—but it also underscores the belief that remanding them to the care and supervision of the state was a benefit to Illinois society as a whole, worth the cost of their incarceration.

If Geneva served as a school, it wasn’t reflected in the way the youth arrived or were identified. They were charged with crimes and went to court but were not sentenced to Geneva for a set amount of time. Instead, they were held until a parole board determined they were “rehabilitated” according to a set of standards that were dependent on the religious views, racial biases, and attitudes toward female sexuality of the board members at the time. Receiving parole could take months or years. For some, it never came. And as with the institution’s name, language shifted over the decades between “girls,” “delinquents,” and “inmates,” but in all the academic papers and newspaper archives I’ve read over the last three and a half years, never did I see the word “student.” 

“I don’t know what you’d call us. I’m not sure. Technically, we were inmates, I guess,” said Steve Shikenjanski, who was incarcerated there between 1971 and 1972. Like other survivors, when recalling memories at Geneva, he referred to himself and the others there as “kids.” 

“I hate using ‘inmate.’ ‘Student,’ maybe?” wondered Cherie Livett Bombell, who worked as a counselor at Geneva in the 70s. “I don’t really know what to use. ‘Incarcerated youth?’ ‘Kids behind bars?’ It depends on if you want to use a shock factor. Who are we respecting? Or who are we playing to?”

There were classrooms at Geneva, as well as vocational training in accordance with jobs thought to be suitable for women at the time: laundress and cook, housekeeper and farmer’s wife. In the mid-20th century, Geneva added beautician, restaurant worker, and stenographer, and in the more liberated 1970s, the institution launched an electronics program. Each introduction was yet another attempt at rehabilitation—not only of the youth decried as delinquents but of the institution itself. The Illinois State Training School for Girls began as it would end: a compassionate idea, a sincere and Progressive hope. 

Part of the late-19th-century Progressive reform movement that, in Chicago, saw the birth of social service works like Hull House and the founding of the country’s first youth court, Geneva emerged at the intersection of a growing call for “juvenile justice,” an emerging mental health system, and a burgeoning interest in eugenics. Illinois was the mother of all three.

From the beginning, Geneva was a woman-led project. In Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, a book-length study of the institution, Michael Rembis wrote that despite gender-based academic and career limitations, “middle class [white] women created a niche for themselves in ‘maternalist medicine’ and public health. . . . In Illinois, professional maternalists were instrumental in creating the juvenile court, the juvenile psychopathic institute, and the juvenile protective association.” Their proximity to motherhood, the symbolic power they held in the home, and the actual power they held thanks to their class status, race, and relationship with white men gave these “maternalists” the force to influence social programs and change laws, even before they had the power to vote. 

In Chicago, these women went into the city’s ethnic enclaves and slums to conduct research on the causes of poverty, disease, women working outside of the home, families having a so-called “irresponsible” number of children, and other perceived threats to a stable and healthy America. They used the results of their research to support the existing beliefs of social reformers, who already considered single mothers who depended on the state a “community menace.” In this way, Rembis wrote, they worked closely with their male counterparts to “make eugenic commitment a reality in Illinois.”

In August 1894, one maternalist reform group, the Chicago Area Women’s Refuge for the Reformed, purchased 51 acres of farmland in Geneva. They did so in partnership with the board of trustees of the original Chicago-based State Home for Female Juvenile Offenders. The two organizations had a shared goal: to transform “delinquent” urban girls, all of whom were poor and most of whom were either immigrants or from immigrant families, into women with Protestant, middle-class values. “Rehabilitated” and “reformed” were the watchwords. Perhaps farm labor, domestic chores, and discipline in the traditional, tranquil countryside, with staff meant to mimic the ideal nuclear family, could set wayward girls onto the right path. In December 1894, Geneva’s first superintendent, Amigh—the woman who castigated Anna’s character to the press after the girl died under her care—moved into one of the original farmhouses on the property. With her came eight girls. 

As the institution put down roots in Geneva, the number of girls incarcerated there began to climb. In 1899, the state expanded the property by 40 more acres. Ten years later, an additional 150 acres would solidify its parameters for the rest of its existence, with its population growing in kind. At its height, Geneva contained upwards of 500 youth.

About a decade into Geneva’s existence—and eight months after Anna Weheen died—the Chicago Tribune published an article titled “Orphanage Girls Make Good Wives: Training of State Institution Well Fits Them for Household Management.” The paper itself had documented desperate parents attempting to get their daughters back from Geneva, but the article repeated the myth that most girls at Geneva were orphans. The story praised institutional leaders for forcing the girls to do traditional women’s labor, which would leave them “fitted to become the best housewives found in the homes of this country.” 

“No one may rightfully torture the object of this school into a place of punishment,” the writer declared. “There isn’t a single feature of it that is not calculated and does not bring about the better life of a fortunate rather than unfortunate inmate.”

As in the Geneva Republican write-up about Anna’s death, Amigh is a main source for this Tribune story. At the beginning of her reign as superintendent—which, running from 1894 to 1911, would be the longest in Geneva’s history—she argued that the girls incarcerated to her care could be reformed “to become good wives and mothers and take pride in establishing good American homes.” But eventually, wrote historian Anne Meis Knupfer in an article from 2000, Amigh endorsed the sterilization of Geneva girls and others like them.

During Amigh’s career, eugenics “fit well with dominant scientific theories that rooted modern social problems in the minds and bodies of the deviant ‘other’—poor people, new immigrants, anarchists, people with disabilities—and not in social, economic, or political systems,” wrote Rembis. Like other women reformers of her time, Amigh believed that “severe poverty, delinquency, and nonnormative sexual behavior” were manifestations “of a hidden but highly heritable impairment.”

Until Geneva’s closure, every girl who entered was subjected to physical and psychological exams as well as intelligence testing. For its first few decades, Geneva produced eugenics research so substantial that the “data” collected on the girls was quoted by proponents around the country, including American eugenicist and segregationist Henry H. Goddard and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. If these tests determined that you had what we might identify now as a mental illness, an intellectual disability, or PTSD, you might be transferred to one of Illinois’s new facilities for “feebleminded adults” and face involuntary commitment for the rest of your life.

Impoverished mothers, writing letters to Geneva begging for their daughters to be released back to their care, caused Amigh a “great deal of annoyance,” in part because she didn’t think these women were fit mothers precisely because they were poor. A state eugenic law allowing for the confinement of “feebleminded girls” at Geneva through their child-bearing years until menopause, Amigh argued, was necessary “for the future good of the State” because it would “cut down on the expense of caring for paupers and criminals.” This law, the first in the country allowing for indefinite and involuntary commitment of “feebleminded” individuals to state institutions, passed in Illinois in 1915. From then until 1950, according to Rembis in an earlier article, “Geneva staff committed approximately 5-10 percent [of] inmates each year to one of two state institutions for the ‘feebleminded.’”

The fertile, feebleminded girl was considered both prey and sexual predator, as well as a threat to the health of the state and country. Geneva authorities obsessed over the girls in countless ways but paid special attention to their sexualities and sexual activities. “Psychologists and psychiatrists often questioned females about their daydreams, autoerotic activities, lesbian inclinations, and heterosexual involvements,” wrote Meis Knupfer. But upon arrival at Geneva, before they even began the battery of psychological examinations, “the girls first had their bodies scrutinized for diseases, pregnancy, and proof of virginity.” These exams were used to confirm psychiatric diagnoses. The criteria for diagnoses like “dull normal” or “borderline feebleminded” included engaging in sex work, being pregnant or giving birth outside of marriage, having a sexually transmitted infection (STI), or demonstrating other “sexual disturbances” and “intractable behavioral problems.” Accusing a relative, or any man, of sexual assault was enough to get you locked up. “In many cases, experts interpreted stories of sexual abuse as either a direct sign of an inmate’s inherent inability to control both herself and the men she encountered, as the product of overactive imagination . . . or as signs of the girl’s willingness to deceive, all of which they classified as evidence of mental ‘defect,’” wrote Rembis. Other times, girls too poor and racially or ethnically marginalized to get care elsewhere ended up at Geneva for protection from assault, for care for pregnancy, or to recover from an STI.

According to Meis Knupfer, Geneva did not allow pregnant girls entrance during its first few years. But by 1900, records show that two newly incarcerated girls, as well as three returned parolees, were pregnant. The institution began requesting the state build a hospital so girls could deliver their babies on Geneva’s grounds in 1910, but it took until 1924 for the state to comply, Meis Knupfer wrote. “Following recommendations by Illinois clubwomen, the state eventually added an on-campus nursery, complete with its own pediatrician.”

For Geneva’s first 40 years, girls were encouraged to keep their babies with them rather than put them up for adoption, which was consistent with the institution’s emphasis on domesticity in its curricula (and consistent with girls who were paroled out to cook and clean in the private homes of married couples, although they sometimes were reincarcerated at Geneva after becoming pregnant by the men who owned those homes). “We try to teach them what the three words—mother, home, and heaven—mean,” one early 20th century biannual report from Geneva proclaimed, according to Meis Knupfer. By the 1930s, Geneva administrators were directing the girls to give up their babies for adoption. “Given the high number of girls who had been paroled only to return to Geneva, the administrators probably concluded that ‘fallen’ women would be ‘bad’ mothers,” Meis Knupfer wrote.

For several years in the 2010s, Livett Bombell, the former counselor at Geneva, ran a blog called Kids Behind Bars: Geneva, Illinois. The archive of her posts is a rich record of memories of Geneva and the young people there for whom she cared deeply. The posts also served as virtual beacons for survivors and their descendants, drawing them to the comments sections to reconnect, share their own memories, and ask their own questions. One of the most common topics came from adult children searching for mothers, who’d been Geneva girls—and Geneva girls, now old women, searching for their kids:

i was there 3 times, 63-64, 66-68…had my first son there, came in preg!! please call me i am looking for my son

I was born at the time of my mothers incarceration. My father may have come to visit my mother while she was there. I just recently sent a letter to IL DOC under the F.O.I.A. requesting any and all records from that facility. I am 45 years old now and time is running out. I need some closure in my life about who my father may have been.

I to was at the Geneva home for girls. I was there some time around 1967 to1969. I also gave birth to a baby boy that died. I left in june of 1969 after the birth and death of my son who died while I was still at the school. It was a hard time for me,and father Kaiser did not have my son buried there but in a catholic cemetery where he was pastor. I am now 64yrs old, but the past still haunts me to this day. I will never forget my life at home or at Geneva. I want to know how kids got to be treated like this.

My mom hated to speak of that place, but she did tell me about a tiny part of it. she said that she worked in the bakery. she told me how she’d talk to me in her belly and of the responses she’d get from me after eating peach cobbler there. she said that when she went into labor, that another girl was in the infirmary in labor as well. they did not come for my mother until I was crowning. she said that it was too late to get to the hospital, so I was born there. they whisked me away from her right after birth. she told me of how she’d hear me crying and no one would pick me up or pay attention to me. she would yell and cry for them to pick me up, only to end up in the hole for yelling. I have a made up birth certificate. I have no idea if Geneva detention kept a record of my birth or not. I called there once, in about ’79-’80. I asked for the doctor listed at the bottom of my birth certificate. They put a man on the phone with me. He seemed to be very vehement about my not being born there. he said no babies were ever born there. there’s just so much I would love to find out. do you suppose they still have any records?

In total, I found records for 36 babies who died during Geneva’s existence. That number is almost certainly an undercount. I found no records of infant death before 1920, and it’s highly unrealistic that, given how many girls were pregnant at Geneva, along with the dangerous state of labor and delivery at the turn of the century, it took a quarter century for infant death to touch the institution. (For example, according to the earliest data compiled by the Illinois Department of Public Health, the state’s infant mortality rate in 1907 was 140 out of every 1,000 live births; by comparison, it was 5.6 in 2021.)

In museum archives, newspaper records, and on headstones, some babies are remembered by their mother’s names: Infant son of Elise Valdez, Infant of F Frerichs, Infant Wilkes, Infant Trotter. A few names are expansive and full, perhaps hinting that their mothers hoped they would have a big life: Virginia Lee Fuller, Paul Donald Dugger, Robin Lynn Spaw. The first infant death at Geneva of which I found a record, Frank Mitchell, occurred on April 16, 1920, four years before the institution’s hospital was built. The last baby in the records to die, Samuel Starks, passed on May 29, 1970. All the babies in the records, except for Frank, were buried on Geneva’s grounds.

But even within this school–jail and despite a violent eugenics movement working against them, girls at Geneva found ways to express their agency and define their own identities, often at great cost. They performed hysteria via sudden fits of blindness, they passed out, they self-mutilated—acts of intense emotional and psychological pain that also were acts of disobedience and reclamation, of regaining control over their bodies. They hypnotized themselves into trances and seemed to gain clairvoyant powers. They self-published advice in their school newspaper on how to maintain composure during exams with the psychologists they derided as the “brain-touchers.” They smoked cigarettes and stopped wearing underwear. They physically attacked the matrons and each other. They told lies. Girls masturbated, escaped to have sex with boys and men, and had sex—and fell in love with—their fellow prisoners. In 1935, a psychiatrist reported that 38 percent of the 176 girls at the institution had engaged in queer relationships with one another. “Whenever the staff discovered these affairs,” Meis Knupfer wrote, “they isolated the girls, then subjected them to a relentless schedule of conferences with the staff, vigorous physical exercise, and sublimational activities, such as sewing and reading. Their diets were also modified to exclude starchy and rich foods” for fear their consumption made the girls more self-indulgent and sexual. Through extensive review of decades of records, Rembis concluded that “inmates rarely showed signs of being passive or powerless during their exams,” even if their examiners came to harsher conclusions because of it. 

And, of course, runaways were common. According to one report, there were 85 escape attempts within three months of 1959 alone. Girls studied maps and noted the highways and the river before they ran away, using landmarks to guide them, especially the tracks of the Chicago, Aurora, and Elgin (CA&E) Railroad. These tracks and stations are mentioned in dozens of stories about Geneva runaways. Police and administrators implored the public to keep an eye out for escapees along the train routes. Sometimes, this led to the girls’ recapture; other times, people found their bodies. 

In addition to Anna, at least three other girls died trying to escape Geneva. In 1919, 15-year-old Gertrude George burst from the woods of Glenwood Park and was hit by a train running on the CA&E, where her body was dragged before it fell on the third rail. In 1924, eight months after giving birth to a baby who “died of convulsions” and was buried in the Geneva cemetery, 20-year-old Sadie Cooksey slipped and fell onto the third rail of the CA&E in Batavia. Her body was found the next day.

A particularly haunting death occurred in September 1912. After hours of roaming through farmland trying to evade capture, three Geneva girls dressed in white climbed up to the tracks near Batavia. It was dark out, and the girls held hands as they walked down the rails. One of them, 15-year-old Zoe Priddy, stepped onto the electric third rail. She died immediately, and the other two were flung from the rail by the force of the current streaming through her hands. They were burned but survived. As they ran for help, a train operator bearing down the track mistook Zoe’s white-clad body for newspaper and ran her over. 

Today, no signs memorialize these girls’ deaths. Instead, the mixed-use Illinois Prairie Path covers these tracks. Thousands of people use the path every year, ignorant of the history hidden below.

Three of the five Geneva survivors I spoke to tried to escape at least once. When Shikenjanski ran away with two other boys, they followed train tracks and, when it started to rain, slept in a boxcar. Caught the next day, Shikenjanski and the other boys were taken to Saint Charles, a maximum security boys’ prison not far from Geneva that was well known for its brutality. The boys were held in solitary confinement for several days, until Livett Bombell arrived and “saved our asses,” as Shikenjanski recalled to me, by advocating that all three boys be returned to Geneva rather than incarcerated elsewhere. 

Sharon Randall-Friday, who spent all but three months of the years between 1965 and 1969 incarcerated at Geneva, tried multiple times. “I never got very far,” she recalled. “I didn’t really do it to escape. I did it because I could. Because I wanted to be outside of that place, even if it was just for a moment.” For Randall-Friday, running away, despite its risks, was the one way she could regain autonomy over her body and life while at Geneva. “I’ve always been a free-spirited person, and locking me up was really hard,” she said. “I contemplated suicide a number of times when I was in Geneva. I actually sliced my wrist once, but they found me.” 

Ron Camacho was at Geneva as a teenager from 1972 to 1973. Part of the first group of boys at the coed institution, Camacho was sent there for his role in beating and robbing a man on the el who propositioned him and his friends, all minors, for sex in exchange for a few bucks. Camacho was sent to Cook County’s Audy Home, a youth detention center (and another Progressive-era creation) infamous for its overcrowding and poor treatment of the young people there. (Audy Home is today called the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center [JTDC]. In 2024, almost 200 survivors filed two lawsuits alleging that staff at the center engaged in decades of systemic sexual abuse of the minors in their care.) 

“Audy Home was very, very brutal,” Camacho told me. From there, he was sent to the adult prison in Joliet for “sorting,” a series of tests which aimed to measure—along with his IQ and whether he was disabled or mentally ill—the possibility of his rehabilitation. 

“They would do all these psychological profiles on you to determine if you were violent,” said Shikenjanski, who was sent from Joliet to Geneva the year before Camacho. “I remember inkblots.” If officials determined that you had violent tendencies, Shikenjanski recalled, “then you were going to go to a high-security [prison] that was more like a work camp.” While undergoing evaluation at Joliet, Shikenjanski fought off physical and sexual violence. In contrast, “Geneva was private,” he explained. “You had your own room, which was a huge safety thing.” Saint Charles was one possibility for Shikenjanski and Camacho. But both would be sent to Geneva, and even though it offered them much more safety from physical and sexual violence than Audy Home, Joliet, or any other place they had been or could’ve been shipped to, both still ran away.

Camacho’s mother, an Ojibwe child forcibly separated from her family, ran away from one of the U.S.’s infamous “Indian boarding schools.” Decades later, her son would flee Geneva. The night Camacho ran, he passed the cemetery full of “a lot of little unmarked graves. A lot of stillborns for some reason, rather than growing orphanages around [the institution].” He ran through the cemetery, past the headstones, over a barbed wire fence, down a lush, thicketed gulch that tumbled out to a county road, then downhill further still to the bank of the Fox River. Camacho followed the river till the highway, where he hitched a ride with two truckers back to Chicago. 

“I was furious,” he told me. At 17 years old, he’d been told getting his GED would increase the possibility of his parole, but when he completed it in just three and a half months, the parole board denied him release, saying, as he recalled it, that no one ever left that soon. “I made up my mind: ‘That’s it, I’m out of here.’”

One superintendent in the early 1930s, reflecting on this common hunger for escapism, said, “Some women get a facial. When things get too bad, I usually go out and buy a hat. Geneva girls had none of that: Their only means of escape was the literal act of running away.” For the first decades of the 20th century, girls who were caught running away were sent to the disciplinary Wallace Cottage, where they underwent something called “intensive training.” According to Meis Knupfer, “the nature of such training was not disclosed.”

As the years passed, local newspapers began to publish reports of girls being beaten and sent to the “hole” for minor infractions. In 1911, the Tribune published a series of articles on Amigh’s ouster under allegations of torture. Investigators found and destroyed a “strong chair,” purportedly of Amigh’s own invention, “so constructed that a girl could be confined in it and made unable to use her limbs, hands or feet.” It wasn’t the use of the strong chair that the officials disagreed with but the length of time that the girls were restrained. They also found two rawhide whips that bore “evidence of much use.” Geneva’s leaders, especially in the later years, tried to use positive reinforcement to control behavior—rewards, privileges, treats—but many teens were punished for infractions with solitary confinement, defined by one United Nations expert as torture, until the institution’s end.

The first time Randall-Friday was sent to solitary confinement, she was 12. The building, which she alternately called the “unit” and the “hole,” was newly built at the time and mostly subterranean. The rooms inside it were smaller than the already small bedrooms and contained a metal bed frame with no mattress and a hole in the floor to use as a toilet. Once inside, Randall-Friday was strapped to the bed with leather restraints. The metal bit into her skin. “They could never keep me in the straps,” she wrote to me over email. “I would always get out of them, and would never answer how I did it :D”

Randall-Friday was born in Oak Park, then lived in and around Chicago. Her father was violent, her mother cold, her stepfather constantly picking at her. Randall-Friday began leaving home at age ten and would live with people she met in city parks. Her favorite place to go was Humboldt Park. “The Hispanic people were so open and friendly and accepted me more than my family ever had.” When she was 12, she started dating a marine who went AWOL to be with her. “I thought I was all grown up. I wanted to grow up way too fast,” she told me during one interview. “And I really didn’t enjoy my childhood at all. I was outgoing, outspoken, angry. Mean, very mean.”

Randall-Friday, sent to Geneva for truancy, quickly developed a reputation for fighting that landed her in solitary for a week or two at a stretch. “No school, no books. We didn’t go outside,” she said. “When you’re in punishment, you’re just in punishment. The only time you leave that room is to go down the hall to collect your mattress at night and then take your mattress back down the hall in the morning.”

During the day, Randall-Friday would lie on the floor of her cell and count bricks. The unit was large, and multiple girls were locked up in individual cells at any given time, but when it was time to retrieve or return their mattresses, each girl was let out individually to try to ensure their isolation from one another was complete. But in this, the staff failed. Locked up in their cells, the girls would lie on their bellies and whisper into the inch of space between their doors and the floor. “Who just came down? Who are you? I’m Sharon, who are you?” The acoustics of the unit made it hard for staff to hear these voices, but the girls had no trouble if they were low enough to the floor.“We weren’t supposed to—we were told to be quiet all the time,” Randall-Friday recalled, “but we talked; we sang to each other.” They told each other stories about their lives before Geneva and shared the latest gossip. But eventually, the girls would lapse into quiet. In the unending tedium of their confinement, there was only so much to say.

Sometimes, girls ran away from Geneva even before they were there. In 1912, a 16-year-old Black girl, afraid of being sent to Geneva, jumped from the three-story window of a Chicago police station. She fractured her arm and dislocated her knee but survived. “She cited not wanting to be taken to Geneva as the reason for her escape attempt,” wrote DePaul University history professor Tera Agyepong. “She stated that she just wanted to ‘get out of there to show them that they could not keep me locked up like a criminal.’ There is no evidence that her efforts succeeded in preventing her from being sent to Geneva.”

Growing up 40 years later in Altgeld Gardens Homes, a public housing project on Chicago’s south side, Cathy Loving heard stories about Geneva and Saint Charles that scared her. The rumors, passed from kid to kid as they played, took on the shape of neighborhood myth. “They put people there if they skipped school,” she told me. “They said the bad kids got sent there.” But one day, Loving learned one of her friends had been incarcerated at Geneva. “She isn’t bad,” Loving thought. Then another friend of hers, a “real pretty girl,” suddenly began wearing men’s clothes before she, too, disappeared to Geneva. It turned out that she had been sexually assaulted by her boyfriend’s father. “Here she was, a rape victim, and she got sent there,” Loving recalled. All around her, it felt like children were vanishing. 

Then, as now, the majority of the residents of Altgeld Gardens were Black. Also then, as now, Black girls were overrepresented in Illinois youth courts and centers. According to Agyepong, 17 percent of the 59 girls incarcerated at Geneva when it opened were Black, even though Black people made up only 1.5 percent of the state’s population. In the 1920s, that percentage rose further: Black people still made up only 1 to 2 percent of Illinois’s population, but at Geneva they were about one-fifth of the population in 1920 and more than one-third in 1928. 

When Loving arrived there in 1961, she was 14 years old. She had ended up in court after twice running away from home to escape beatings and rapes from her stepfather, a detective with the Chicago Police Department. The second time she ran away, the police station she fled to for help transferred her to a jail cell, where she was held overnight. Shortly after, Loving was sent to Audy Home. While at Audy, Loving, like Camacho, was examined by psychiatrists. As she underwent testing and awaited court, Loving taught other girls how to type, cajoled them into getting up and taking baths, and combed and fixed their hair. 

In court, Loving’s stepfather—her abuser—and her mother testified against her. Loving had no legal representation, and no one else was allowed in the courtroom. On the stand, her parents swore Loving was unmanageable; she did sex work, they claimed, and used drugs. “I’m a juvenile,” she recalled to me. “And that’s my birth mother. These are my parents. And both of them lied on me.” After listening to their testimony, the judge remanded her to Geneva. The next thing Loving knew, her wrists and ankles were handcuffed and connected by a chain. A police officer escorted her out of court. “I couldn’t talk. All I could do was cry,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe that that was happening to me.”

The institution treated its Black youth worse than white youth on the whole. I’ve read multiple papers by historians describing how Black girls at Geneva were segregated and considered to be more dangerous, more sexually deviant, and less likely to be capable of “rehabilitation” than the white girls. Through the middle of the 20th century, “many experts and reformers focused on poor and immigrant girls of European descent because they believed there was in fact a ‘problem’—a deviation from a normal and ideal standard of behaviour that could be addressed through legal reforms and institutions,” wrote Agyepong. “Antisocial conduct, promiscuity and illegitimacy were not seen as behaviours that were outside the norm for African American girls, however.” 

Higher rates of pregnancy and STIs among Black girls entering Geneva were used as proof of their moral and racial defectiveness, but in fact these numbers reflected their lack of access to health care and social resources, even compared to poor white girls. They had fewer options for private or public places to give birth or recover from infections, so they were sent to Geneva. “As a result of the lack of resources for Black children in Chicago, Black girls who arrived from there at Geneva tended to be younger than their white counterparts,” Agyepong wrote. And, as in Loving’s case, the majority of girls who were incarcerated through the courts were there because a judge found them to be either “sex delinquents” or truants.

At Geneva, staff members masculinized their Black charges. In surveys, reports, and recommendations, Geneva doctors and psychiatrists portrayed them as “the most violent and aggressive residents at the institution,” wrote Agyepong, though they were at Geneva for the same offenses as white girls. In particular, Agyepong detailed how two white women officials’ “depictions of African American girls as desperately crazed, aggressive, oversexed beings who resorted to violence as a result of their desire to have sexual relationships with white girls bore an uncanny relationship to the propaganda used to justify the lynching of Black men who were charged with raping white women.”

Geneva leaders were so disturbed by the possibility of interracial friendship and love—and the potential of either to build resistance to their power—that they kept the girls segregated in work, housing, and play. It was not uncommon for the number of Black girls in a cottage to be more than twice its occupancy limit. In 1928, a cottage matron told visitors that 104 Black girls were forced to stay in two cottages, each with a maximum capacity of 32. According to Agyepong, there were vacancies in the white cottages at the time. 

After Loving was handcuffed and chained, she was placed in the back of a paddy wagon with two other girls sentenced to Geneva. Already mothers, they were even younger than her. The driver of the paddy wagon, a man she learned much later was a Cook County deputy sheriff named Frederick Douglas Lyle, told her to stop crying. “You shouldn’t have done what you did,” she recalled him saying. Through tears, Loving stuck up for herself. “I didn’t do anything!” she said, describing the abuse she’d endured. The other girls chimed in. “That’s a goody two-shoes,” Loving recalled them saying. “All she did was help us, and showed us how to fix our hair.” Eventually, as they spoke, Lyle looked in the back mirror and gave Loving his handkerchief. He told her to dry her face. “I don’t know, but I believe ya,” Loving recalled he said as they pulled up to the institution. “I’m gonna get anybody I can contact.” But Loving didn’t have any hope.

Once inside Geneva, Loving was forced to strip naked and shower, then was fingerprinted and photographed with a number around her neck. She was still crying. “This lady said, ‘Bitch, you belong to us now. You need to stop that crying. You shouldn’t have done what you did.’” Then the woman hit her with a billy cub. That first night, a strong storm swept through Geneva. Loving wasn’t given a blanket, but she couldn’t get the window in her room to shut. Outside, lightning flashed. Inside, cold rain pelted her skin. “I just begged God to just take me away,” she said.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Lyle began to advocate on her behalf. Loving’s friends signed affidavits corroborating her story of abuse. A social worker invited Loving to his downtown Chicago office for an interview. “He said, ‘You got a raw deal,’” she told me. “‘You gonna get out of there.’” The social worker also told her to keep to herself and “don’t get involved with anybody out there.” This wasn’t the only time an adult on Loving’s side warned her to not act friendly with the girls at Geneva, lest it be perceived as, or lead to, queerness. “They told me, ‘Do not make friends with anybody, because they pass notes.’ There was a homosexual thing going around. I was warned about that.” 

The physicians and matrons often viewed queer behavior through a heterosexual frame: One girl became the male, the other the female. Race and racism were integral. Black girls were considered more sexually aggressive and more masculine, but reports made by researchers and staff that described Black girls’ “violent” efforts to make romantic or sexual relationships with white girls also, unwittingly, revealed white girls’ agency in these relationships. “Several offered examples of white inmates actively seeking relationships with Black girls and defying staff members’ rules in order to do so,” wrote Agyepong. At one dance at the institution, white girls insisted on dancing with Black girls, to the intense frustration of the staff. 

Sometimes, white girls vocalized the same racist understandings of their romantic and sexual behaviors as their elders. According to Meis Knupfer, “Given the absence of men at Geneva, one white girl admitted, ‘All we can do here is to take some Negro girl . . . at the Chapel or somewhere else. Kiss them for all we are worth. That is all the thrill we get.’” Other times, the girls unified. “A white matron, upon observing the friendly behavior of white girls with a group of African American girls, called them ‘white trash’ and ‘n—-r lovers,’” wrote Meis Knupfer. “In protest, the white girls moved into the cottage with the African American girls, causing a ‘minor scandal.’”

“They didn’t have to worry about me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with sex any kind of way,” Loving said to me. At Geneva, she kept to herself and made no friends. A few years later, Randall-Friday, who is white, had a different experience. “I actually made love to one of the girls out there,” Randall-Friday recalled. “Evelyn—she was a very pretty Black girl, really sweet on me. Snuck into her room.” Later, she dated a shy Native American teen who went by Tony and later transitioned. Tony was one of the very few people Randall-Friday stayed in touch with from her Geneva years. In 1935, a Geneva social worker reported that “groups of African American and white girls formed their own families of nephews, uncles, and so forth,” wrote Meis Knupfer. “Ironically, the girls had subverted the school’s and court’s visions of familial cottage life with their own.” 

Tensions at Geneva often erupted along color lines. While Loving was able to keep to herself during the approximate month she spent at Geneva, Randall-Friday was there for nearly four years. Shortly after her arrival to Geneva, she lost two front teeth in a fight with a Black girl she’d never seen before. Randall-Friday was small for her age but earned a reputation among students and staff alike for fighting “like a Tasmanian devil.” If a Black girl was bullying a white girl, Randall-Friday wrote me over email, the white girl would come to her and she’d fight on their behalf. 

But the queer, interracial family structures the girls developed helped them build trust and maintain peace. “Most of the girls participated whether they really wanted to or not,” said Randall-Friday. Shortly after she lost her teeth, she was inducted into the Chandler family. Randall-Friday was sitting in her cottage window when a teen who called themselves Gene Chandler approached her. “Are you Sharon Randall?” they asked. “I need to talk to you.” Keeping a watchful eye out for the guards, Chandler offered Randall-Friday their protection.

“I don’t need your protection!” Randall-Friday snapped. According to her, Chandler replied, “Well, I know. That’s why I’m asking you to be my wife.” When Randall-Friday asked Chandler if they needed her protection, they both started to laugh. “She was very pretty, slightly taller than me,” said Randall-Friday. “Her hair was short, a tiny Afro. They told me to pick a name for myself, and I picked Estella. This was how we would refer to each other when we wrote each other jots [notes], so staff never knew who the jots were from.”

Chandler resided in a different cottage than Randall-Friday. A teenager, they worked in laundry, while Randall-Friday, who was only 12, was still required to attend classes. “It was a status thing” to be a wife, Randall-Friday recalled. “You belong to the Chandler family. I only ever saw her a handful of times.”

Loving joined no families. One day, the phone in her cottage rang. It would be a few more years before Loving was free from the abuse of her parents, but she was officially freed from Geneva. “I ran across the campus to the office and they said, ‘Whatever you have, do you want to take it with you?’ But nothing I had I wanted to take with me, because nothing never belonged to me.”

This year, Loving turns 78. As an adult, she intervened to stop one of her sisters from also being sent to Geneva. Later, Loving moved to Georgia, where she started an incest survivors group and still mentors young girls. Before retiring, Loving had careers as a historian, archivist, and museum curator. “I opened up the first school museum in Georgia, and I was honored by the Archivist of the United States of America,” she told me proudly.

In 1992, Loving appeared on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries titled “Lost Savior,” in which she retold her harrowing story and asked the public for help reconnecting to Lyle, the deputy sheriff who had transported Loving to Geneva, whose name she did not know. The night the episode aired, Lyle, who had since retired, was watching. He called the number that flashed across the screen and was connected to Loving after more than 30 years. They met up in person two months later. Six months after that, Loving spoke at his funeral. After his death, the Illinois House passed a resolution offering condolences to Lyle’s family and remembering that he once “helped a young woman gain her innocence.” No resolution has ever been passed acknowledging Geneva’s existence.

Decades after that terrible first night at Geneva, Loving is still afraid of storms. “Whenever it’s thundering and lightning like that, it just leaves me with a bad feeling. Being locked in a room where I couldn’t go get any help, and I was told not to say anything?” That feeling, she said, defined her fundamental experience of Geneva.

“It’s a story that needs to be told,” she said. “I don’t know where they send girls now.”

Fifty years after Camacho ran away, he came back to Geneva with me to visit the cemetery. “My god, this is it,” he said as we pulled into the subdivision. “I mean, I know where I’m at.” We got out of the car and walked to a tall, black iron fence. On the other side, among stalks of overgrown grass and thick wet autumn leaves, headstones glimmered in the late afternoon light. Although we were within visiting hours, the cemetery gate was locked. Camacho walked the cemetery’s perimeter, found a gap in the fence, and slipped easily through. 

We moved as we talked, peering down and reading names and dates out loud. Some parts of the cemetery were the same from Camacho’s time: The chain-link fence in the back was there when he ran through the cemetery during his bid for escape. The same line of rusted barbed wire still ran along the top. But from the patch of infant headstones, we could see flower beds and two-story play sets in well-designed backyards. Camacho gestured to some other graves. “I think these headstones are newer,” he said. “It didn’t used to be lined up like this. I don’t think there is a body under each one.”

In front of the cemetery, a memorial plaque asked for God’s mercy on the “51 souls” buried here. Camacho shook his head. “Fifty-one in nearly a hundred years?” he said. “There has to be more.” Later, I’d find out he was right. While researching this story, I found records confirming that at least 70 people died on the grounds of Geneva during its 84-year run: 31 girls, 36 infants, two workers, and one worker’s child. Notes on the cemetery from the Geneva archives reveal that while the cemetery contains 51 headstones, it holds at least 55 graves. I couldn’t find any official source containing the total number of deaths that occurred at Geneva.

I followed Camacho as he traced a path I couldn’t see. “There were sidewalks and lanes,” he said, gesticulating around. Confidently, he walked across the private lawn of a large house to its undeveloped side lot, where chunks of old yellow brick popped up through the dirt. 

The garage door of the house opened. A white man in a zip-up fleece came out, his brow politely furrowed, and asked if he could help us with something. “Ah,” said Camacho with a broad smile. “Just reminiscing.” 

I explained that Camacho was a former student at the school that used to be here. “Got it,” the man replied, clearly still confused. “I’m sorry, where are you from?” he said. I introduced Camacho and myself, and again mentioned the Geneva institution. “Ron was here the last decade it went coed,” I explained.

 “Oh!” the man said, brightening. He turned to Camacho and gestured around his lawn. “What was here?”

“Wallace Cottage,” Comacho answered. He explained that before it was a coed cottage, Wallace housed the most aggressive girls and served medical needs. Across from the driveway where we were standing, there had been academic buildings. “The central command guard station was right on this side. This,” Camacho said, pointing to the broken yellow brick, “was still a street. After the graveyard was where they built the new unit for segregation, but that’s completely gone now.”

It was a lot of information, and the man had trouble following. “So this was . . . the pharmacy?” he said hopefully. 

“No, this was the hospital,” Comacho said cheerfully, “as big as your house! And at one point, they would have a nursery. But by the time I got here in ’72, it was converted into a regular building.” 

The man’s face fell slightly, but he seemed genuinely interested. He didn’t know much about Geneva, but his wife was on the board of the museum, he offered. She helped take care of the cemetery, which he admitted “still needs more work.”

As we talked, a blond child came out of the garage on a bike and wheeled between us. We said our goodbyes. “Thank you for sharing all that,” said the man to Ron. “I really appreciate it.” He disappeared back into the garage. 

From the railroad tracks a half mile to our north—one of the longtime escape lines of desperate incarcerated children—a train whistle began to blow.

In February 2025, a third lawsuit alleging prolific sexual and physical abuse of youth by juvenile detention center staff in Illinois was filed against Illinois, Cook County, and several state agencies. This latest complaint spans 1997 until 2023 and brings the total number of people alleging abuse to 800. 

So far, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and attorney general Kwame Raoul have declined to comment on these cases. Pritzker, who promised to close the remaining five state-run youth detention centers in Illinois early in his tenure, has instead made plans to build a sixth. Continuing the tradition of Geneva, the state hides these child jails behind euphemism—they are now called “Illinois Youth Centers”—and the formal announcement of the sixth is dressed in 21st-century progressive language and values. “The new Illinois Youth Center Lincoln will be a bright, life affirming, trauma-informed, and restorative place,” said Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton in a 2021 press release, made with “love, careful consideration, and improved practices.” 

In November 2023, Injustice Watch published a report revealing that only five of the 16 county-run youth detention centers in Illinois were in compliance with state standards of care. Inspectors found numerous problems, “including detention centers improperly confining kids to their rooms, failing to provide proper clothing or bedding, conducting unnecessary strip searches, and providing insufficient mental health services and school instruction for youths.” In May 2024, Injustice Watch reporter Kelly Garcia detailed Cook County plans to replace the deeply troubled JTDC with smaller “centers of care.” This plan was announced in the wake of a blistering report accusing JTDC officials of using euphemism to cover up the harm they were inflicting on the children they were responsible for. “Semantics do not diminish the harsh reality that JTDC youth are locked in their cells for most of the day, every day,” the committee wrote, according to Jonah Newman and Carlos Ballesteros of Injustice Watch. “No parent would be allowed to do this to their child.” 

“My memories of Geneva have never left me for a moment in my life,” Randall-Friday wrote to me over email. She’s 71 years old now. Randall-Friday has lived in England and in other people’s Illinois basements, and now she’s in Marengo, just 32 miles northwest of Geneva. For a while, she ran a blog about Korean food and dramas. (“I make my own kimchi. I make my own  bibimbap. My first husband was Korean. I watch K-dramas and all kinds of good stuff.”)

Like Camacho, Randall-Friday also went back to Geneva long after it closed, only to find the cottages leveled and well-appointed homes built in their place. Disturbed, she went into town, “to the police station, to the township, to the library. Nobody ever heard of the Geneva girls’ school. I said, ‘You people—you are hiding something!’ I was talking to people older than me; they should have known.” After all, she said to me, the cemetery was right there. Instead, Geneva felt like it had been wiped off the literal map and from the town’s collective memory. 

“It’s wrong for them to just erase what they did to so many girls, just locked them up for an indefinite amount of time because they didn’t want to be home for whatever reason,” Randall-Friday said to me. “The system didn’t work right. This shouldn’t be kept secret. There was hundreds and hundreds of girls, thousands of girls, in my time there. People should know about this!” 

She paused, then repeated herself, firmly. “People should know.”