The waymark coordinates are located at the Corsicana State Home historical marker at State Home Cemetery Park next door.
There's a certain Jekyll and Hyde feeling about this place. If you were here during the Orphan Home years from 1887 to the late 1970s, your experience was completely different from those children who arrived here in 1983, when the Corsicana State Home was turned over to the Texas Youth Commission and repurposed as a juvenile prison for dangerously mentally ill boys who had committed crimes.
In 2013, the State Legislature, tired of decades of horrifying stories of abuse and maltreatment by staff at the Corsicana facility, finally ordered the Corsicana State Home closed. In 2022 the campus is fenced off and offered for sale. The Texas Tribune has the details in their story "Closing Corsicana: Lessons From a Shuttered Youth Detention Center"
Memories of happier, more beneficial days can be found next door at the State Home Cemetery Park, where 60 orphans are buried next to the place that they called home. This park is a monument to and a memorial of the days when placement at the State Orphan Home was a benevolent lifeline for children and the impoverished families who could no longer care for them. It's a peaceful, positive place.
The state historical marker reads as follows:
"CORSICNANA STATE HOME
Created by the 20th Legislature in 1887, the State Orphan Asylum originally provided care for orphans under age 14. State officials located the institution in Corsicana after local citizens donated over 200 acres at this site. The first students arrived in 1889, and by 1890 enrollment totaled 54. Classes met in the chapel before a school building was erected in 1889. By 1897 the institution had an independent school district.
Renamed State Orphan Home before 1899, the facility housed about 400 students in 1900. Here they received academic and vocational instruction. The campus once had extensive farmlands to supply food and provide agricultural training for students. Physical facilities were enlarged as enrollment increased. During the Depression of the 1930s, residents numbered over 800.
The campus school was phased out at the end of the 1955-56 academic year, and students transferred to Corsicana public schools. In 1957 the home was placed under jurisdiction of the Texas Youth Council and was renamed Corsicana State Home.
Thousands of children have benefited from the care and schooling provided by the home. Prominent former students include Robert W. Calvert, Texas Supreme Court Associate Justice, 1950-61, and Chief Justice, 1961-72.
(1977)"
From the Handbook of Texas Online: (
visit link)
"CORSICANA STATE HOME.Corsicana State Home, formerly the State Orphans' Home, was established in 1887 by an act of the Twelfth Legislature to support, educate, and care for orphan or dependent children. It opened on July 15, 1889, and housed fifty-four children the first year. In 1932 the home reached a peak enrollment of 890. During the 1940s the enrollment began to decline, and by 1945 the facility housed only 443 children. By 1948 the orphanage, located three miles west of the Corsicana business district, had twenty-one brick structures and a number of small frame cottages, barns, and outbuildings on 417 acres. In its early years the home operated its own independent school district with a grade school, junior high, and high school. In addition to academic subjects the school offered courses in various vocational fields, including cosmetology, mechanics, printing, agriculture, home economics, and business. Until the 1960s the institution also operated its own farms, dairy, creamery, laundry, cannery, store, power plant, bakery, kitchen, and hospital. Older children worked part-time in these operations and thus received practical training. In 1957 the institution was renamed Corsicana State Home. The home was integrated in the mid-1960s and is now operated under the administration of the Texas Youth Commission. After World War II the school was closed down, and children from the home began to attend the Corsicana public schools. In 1989 the institution served sixty-six children."