Stephen O. Garrison

He was the tenth child of Stephen Ayars Garrison (1806–1869), a minister and New Jersey state legislator, and Elizabeth Coombs (1812–1888).

[4] Garrison married Elizabeth Baldwin August 29, 1879, with whom he had four children; Charles Henry (1880), Norman Scott (1882), Ida Richardson (1884), and Frances Willard (1887).

In the 1840s, his father had tried, unsuccessfully, to pass legislation requiring New Jersey to provide care for citizens with intellectual disabilities.

With no public institution to care for the intellectually disabled, Garrison and his wife Elizabeth opened their home to seven children in need.

[3] Garrison used the mansion and other cash donations to open what was initially called The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-minded Children.

[6] At the time of his death, the Training School had grown to 170 acres and had ten buildings with an estimated worth of $200,000.

In 1892, he began moving students into “cottages.” Garrison's approach, which became known as “The Cottage Plan,”[7] came to dominate thinking on custodial care.

He diversified the school's curriculum and created a medical staff including a neurologist, an ophthalmologist, a gynecologist, a pathologist, an otologist, a laryngologist, and specialists in speech defects.

[5] By 1898, Garrison realized that his health was failing, and began a search for someone who could carry on his work at the Training School.

In a 1988 history of the Training School at Vineland, Eugene Dol argued, “it is probably not an exaggeration to say that for the first half of the 20th century it dominated the field of mental retardation worldwide.”[6]