The House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham

The Institution that Maryland Built to Replace the Plantation

State of Florida, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Cheltenham, MD, is located about 60 miles South of Baltimore. Cheltenham sat in southern Prince George’s County, a region shaped byvtobacco plantations, enslaved labor, scattered farmsteads, and large tracts of forest and marshland. Cheltenham was not a town in the modern sense. It was a crossroads community, comprised of a cluster of farms, a few houses, barns, and outbuildings, with no incorporated municipality.

Before the end of the Civil War in1865, the area’s economy depended heavily on enslaved Black labor. After emancipation, many formerly enslaved families stayed in the region as tenant farmers or laborers. White landowners sought new ways to maintain control over Black labor. The state looked for rural land to build institutions that would “manage” Black youth. The site of the House of Reformation for Colored Boys was chosen in the same way that modern-day ICE looks for detention centers. Gheltenham was selected because it was far from major cities, easy to control, and surrounded by farmland. There would be little oversight, and inmates could be treated any kind of way.

Cheltenham was the first such detention center in the South, but it wouldn’t be the last. Cheltenham was the model for the Florida Industrial School for Boys (Marianna, FL — 1900), the Georgia Training School for Boys (Milledgeville, GA — 1905), the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children (Mt. Meigs, AL — 1911), the Louisiana Training Institute for Colored Youth (Monroe, LA — 1920), and the Mississippi Industrial School for Negro Boys (Oakley, MS-1921). All of these facilities were built for the same reasons:

1. To control Black youth after Reconstruction

2. To supply cheap labor to states and private contractors

3. To enforce racial segregation in juvenile justice

4. To criminalize poverty, truancy, and “vagrancy” among Black children

Cheltenham was the prototype: a state‑run, racially segregated, labor‑extraction institution. The South copied the model. Every one of these institutions had one thing in common. Each is either known or suspected to have secretly buried children who died or were killed while at the school.

In Florida, a University of South Florida forensic team uncovered 55 unmarked graves on the campus. The state later acknowledged that more than 100 boys may have died there.

In Mississippi, local oral histories and archival notes indicate that boys who died were buried on the grounds, though the burial sites have not been fully excavated. The state has never conducted a full forensic investigation.

In Georgia, investigations into the school’s early 20th‑century operations documented deaths from beatings, tuberculosis, and malnutrition. Former staff and local historians have stated that boys were buried in unmarked plots on the property. No formal excavation has been conducted, but state archives reference “institutional burials.”

In Alabama, Records show multiple deaths from disease and abuse. Former students have testified that boys who died were buried on the property. The state has not confirmed or denied burial locations, and no forensic survey has been done.

In Louisiana, State reports from the 1920s to the 1950s list numerous deaths. Burial locations are not well‑documented, but researchers believe some boys were buried on or near the campus.

At the Cheltenham, Maryland, school, an estimated 230 boys are buried there, according to the Maryland Historical Trust. I’m writing this with the Dignified Transfer of six soldiers killed in Kuwait in the ongoing Iran War in the background on television in my office. There has been nothing dignified about the treatment of Black bodies in America. The vast majority at these schools are still there in unmarked or mass graves. Some died of illness, others were murdered, and the states involved generally don’t care.

What you won’t hear from official sources is that these schools were established to replicate slavery. Construction of Cheltenham’s House of Reform preceded Jim Crow. The Black Codes were in place to provide for mass incarceration. Cheltenham did not receive boys for “crime” in the modern sense. It received them for poverty, survival, and behavior that white authorities defined as deviant only when Black children did it.

A Black child could be sent to Cheltenham for not having a job, being found on the street, being homeless, being orphaned, or “wandering without purpose.” There was a catch‑all category used almost exclusively against Black children, including talking back (especially to a white person), disobeying an adult (especially a white one), running away from abusive homes or employers, or “refusing to work.” Judges were allowed to send boys to Cheltenham without any criminal act. When arrested for petty offenses, white boys were typically released to their parents. Black boys were sent to Cheltenham for months or years. We now know that for many Black boys, going to Cheltenham was a death sentence.

The House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham has undergone several name changes to improve its image. In the 1930s, it became the Cheltenham School for Boys. In the 1970s, it was the Cheltenham Youth Facility. In the early 2000s, it became the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, and it operates under that name today. Even in the 21st century, the facility has faced reports of violence, staff misconduct, unsafe conditions, and the disproportionate detention of Black youth. Maryland has acknowledged the institution’s troubled legacy but has not closed the site.

The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services was recently awarded a $200,000 grant to begin searching for the remains of hundreds of boys in the woods near the existing Youth Detention Center. Will they put drapes and curtains at the center to keep current youth from watching the uncovering of graves? Funds will pay for a ground-penetrating radar survey and restoration of the cemetery grounds. The state legislature is considering legislation to open an independent investigation into the House of Reformation. Did I mention the facility is still open and operating?

Cheltenham did not emerge from nowhere. It was built on land already shaped by the logic of the plantation, and it inherited that logic intact. The House of Reformation for Colored Boys was never simply a juvenile institution; it was the state’s answer to emancipation, a way to reassert control over Black childhood at the very moment freedom threatened the racial order. The boys sent there were not criminals. They were poor, orphaned, homeless, or simply inconvenient to a society determined to police their existence. Their “offenses” were the predictable consequences of a world that denied them resources and then punished them for surviving without them.

What happened at Cheltenham — the forced labor, the disease, the unmarked graves — was not an aberration. It was a blueprint. Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana: each built its own version of the same institution, each burying the evidence in the same way. The South did not hide what it was doing; it simply assumed no one would care enough to look. And for more than a century, that assumption held.

Yet the land remembers. The archives remember. The families who never received answers remember. And the modern facility that still operates on the same ground is a reminder that the architecture of racial control rarely disappears — it adapts. The names change, the mission statements soften, the language becomes more palatable, but the underlying structure remains visible to anyone willing to trace the line from then to now.

Cheltenham’s story is not just about the boys who were taken there. It is about the country that built the institution, justified it, expanded it, and kept it alive. To confront that history is not an act of nostalgia or accusation. It is an act of clarity, the first step toward ensuring that what was done to those children is finally seen, finally named, and no longer allowed to hide behind the euphemisms of reform.

#Note: The cover photo is of the Florida Industrial School for Boys in Marianna, FL. No public-domain photo of the Chelten Youth Detention Center in any of its iterations was available.