Training School memories on display at Lakeview

Some of the memorabilia featured in the exhibit on the State Home for Boys, now the New Jersey Training School, currently on display at Lakeview Mansion, Route 22.

Former resident

recalls growing up

on grounds of prison

BY SETH MANDEL

Staff Writer

Despite its name, the State Home for Boys was the childhood home of one local girl.

Christie Hale was born and raised on the grounds of the juvenile prison in Monroe Township because her parents both lived and worked at the facility.

Hale, whose maiden name is Christie Smith, now resides in Enid, Okla., but is among the many excited to visit a new exhibit focused on the history of the prison. “State Home Memories” opened Sunday at Lakeview Mansion, Route 522, Jamesburg.

“It was special,” Hale said of her life at the Grace Hill Road facility, now called the New Jersey Training School for Boys. “It was different. I never thought about it because I never knew anything else.”

Jim Casarella, of Monroe, checks out the exhibit about the State Home for Boys, which opened Sunday at the Lakeview Mansion in Jamesburg.

The exhibit, organized by Borough Historian Thomas Bodall, will run through May 14. It can be viewed on the second and fourth Sundays of the month from 2-4 p.m.

Bodall said the facility opened on 490 acres just over the Jamesburg border in Monroe, on June 28, 1867, as the New Jersey State Reform School.

By 1939, it had 725 acres, much of which was farmed by the inmates, mostly boys who got into trouble with the law at a young age.

“They would basically run the entire place,” Bodall said. “They would do farming, they had a dairy there, a creamery, they would do gardening, they had chickens. Basically, they were self-sufficient.”

Hale’s father was the farming supervisor at the facility, and her mother worked at the campus snack shop. Since employee housing was available, Hale’s parents moved onto the grounds in 1949, just over a year before she was born.

Hale said she would spend time at the campus shop with her mother, and the boys would play cards with her and teach her the different crafts they learned at the facility.

Though her family interacted well with the boys, Hale said the facility management made sure that she and the other children of employees were safe and secure at all times.

“Everyone looked out for us; we were always accounted for every minute of the day,” Hale said. “We were very well watched over and protected, but we never realized it.”

Hale said that if she went to play with some of the other kids, she would call beforehand and call home when she got to the other cottages. But, she believes, living at the facility was the safest one could be from the inmates.

“We were really safer there than on the outside,” she said. “If the boys left, they wanted to go out and steal a car or break into someone else’s house, not ours.”

Hale said her family had good relationships with the boys, and one graduate even returned one day to offer her father a job.

“All the employees treated the boys very well, and worked hard to help them turn their lives around, and put them on the right path,” Hale said.

She recalled that the facility housed 800 inmates at that time. Many had been convicted of theft or vandalism, but some were committed for more serious crimes, such as murder and child molestation.

That, she admitted, made life at the facility exciting, interesting and unusual, and, though security was excellent and thorough, there was always an element of danger.

Many of the boys came from troubled homes, she said, and some couldn’t even write their own names when they arrived at the facility.

Bodall said that usually changed significantly by the time the boys would complete their sentences.

The boys would learn shoemaking, tailoring, masonry and carpentry, as well as receiving training to be electricians and mechanics, among other trades.

“They were teaching the boys how to live life, how to become good members of society,” Bodall said. “They would take these troubled kids and try to reform them. That was the original purpose of the state home.”

Hale said some of the boys would even escape and commit minor crimes simply to increase their sentences.

“Because, as my father would always put it, they had three square meals a day and a clean place to flop, which they didn’t have at home,” she said.

Hale said her father was treated to a surprise when he first watched the 1978 movie Scared Straight.

Though the movie was filmed at the Rahway State Prison, there were several familiar faces.

“Some of those inmates in the movie had been at the State Home, and had worked for my father,” Hale said. “He said there and called them by name.”

Hale said many of the former employees and residents of the facility are still in contact with each other, and she plans to make the trip to Lakeview to view the exhibit. Friends of hers went for the opening of the exhibit on Sunday, and she spent the day laughing and crying as she unearthed the memories of her childhood there.

“This has just rejuvenated everything,” Hale said. “I feel like I’m just a kid again. This has been a very enlightening and nostalgic trip down memory lane for me. We really did have a good life there.”