I.The Photograph That Hid a System in Plain Sight

This 1883 studio portrait looks ordinary until you notice the girl’s shoes.

For more than a century, this photograph sat quietly in a family collection.

No one questioned it.

No one looked closely enough to see what the girl was standing on or why.

It wasn’t until autumn 2019, when Margot Chen began cataloging the Whitmore collection at the Indiana Historical Society, that someone finally did.

Margot was a seasoned archivist, eleven years into a career spent sorting through estate donations—boxes of old paper, faded photographs, and the scent of dried lavender pressed between pages.

The Whitmores were a prominent family in Tippecanoe County: prosperous farmers, later merchants, pillars of their Methodist church.

According to the cover letter from their last surviving heir—a 92-year-old woman in assisted living in Phoenix—the photographs dated from the 1860s through the 1920s.

The family wanted them preserved.

They wanted their history remembered.

Margot began the slow work of sorting cabinet cards from Indianapolis studios, cartes de visite showing men in Union uniforms, tintypes of children holding wooden hoops.

Near the bottom of the second box, wrapped in brown tissue paper, she found a cabinet card in remarkable condition.

The mount was cream-colored with dark burgundy edges.

The photographer’s name, JW Carpenter, Lafayette, was printed in ornate script at the bottom.

On the back, in faded pencil, someone had written: “Aunt Netty and the Warren Girl, 1883.”

Margot held the photograph under her magnifying lamp.

The composition was typical: an older woman, perhaps sixty, sat in a carved wooden chair, dressed in a dark dress with a high collar, her silver hair pinned beneath a modest cap.

Her expression was serene, almost proud.

Standing beside her, one hand resting on the chair’s arm, was a girl of perhaps ten or eleven, wearing Sunday clothes—a light-colored dress with a wide sash, hair pulled back with a ribbon.

She was not smiling.

Children rarely smiled in photographs of this era, but something about her stillness seemed different.

Not the fidgeting discomfort of a child made to hold a pose—something heavier.

Margot’s eyes drifted downward past the dress, past the hem to the floor.

The studio had laid a patterned carpet over the boards, and the girl’s shoes were clearly visible: black leather, button style, and at least two sizes too large for her feet.

At first, Margot assumed it was simply poverty.

Shoes were expensive.

Children outgrew them quickly.

Perhaps the family had given her shoes she could grow into.

But as Margot adjusted the magnification, she noticed something else.

On the side of the left shoe, barely visible, was a stamped marking—letters and numbers pressed into the leather.

She could make out what looked like “ISR” and then a sequence, “147.”

Margot had seen inventory markings before—on hospital equipment, military surplus, furniture from public institutions.

She had never seen them on a child’s shoes.

 

II.

The Shoes That Told a Different Story

Margot Chen had spent her career learning to read photographs the way others read books.

She understood that every image from this period was a construction—a deliberate arrangement of bodies and objects meant to communicate something specific.

The backdrop, the props, the positioning of hands, the angle of a chin—these were not accidents.

Photographers in the 1880s were careful craftsmen, and their subjects (or those who paid for the portraits) were deeply invested in what story the image would tell.

This photograph was meant to tell a story of respectability.

The older woman’s posture, the quality of her dress, the child arranged beside her like an accessory to her domestic sphere.

It was a portrait of a household, of a family relationship: Aunt Netty and the Warren girl.

The phrasing itself suggested kinship, or at least some acknowledged connection—not the Warren servant or the Warren ward, but the Warren girl.

But the shoes would not let Margot go.

She photographed the cabinet card at high resolution and enlarged the image until the pixels began to break apart.

The stamping was clearer now: “ISR147” and, below that in smaller letters, a year—“82.”

She began to research.

ISR was not a common acronym, and she found no commercial shoe manufacturer using it in the 1880s.

She searched Indiana institutions of the period and within an hour had her answer.

The Indiana State Reformatory for Girls, established in 1873, housed young women and girls committed by the courts for various offenses—incorrigibility, truancy, vagrancy.

The language of the records was clinical, but the categories were broad enough to encompass almost any girl whose family could not or would not control her, or any girl who had no family at all.

The reformatory issued clothing and shoes to its inmates.

It marked them with inventory numbers.

Margot sat back in her chair.

The Warren girl, whoever she was, had not been a niece or a cousin or a family friend.

She had been an inmate.

And in 1883, she had been standing in a Lafayette photography studio wearing the state’s shoes.

 

III.

Placed Out: The System Behind the Portrait

The obvious questions came first.

Margot spent the following weeks chasing them through courthouse records, census data, and the surviving archives of the reformatory itself, now held at the Indiana State Archives in Indianapolis.

The reformatory’s records were incomplete, but what remained was detailed.

Each girl committed to the institution was assigned a number.

Her name, age, county of commitment, reason for commitment, and physical description were recorded in leather-bound registers.

There was also, in many cases, a disposition note indicating what had happened to the girl upon her release.

Margot found entry 147 in the register for 1882.

Elsie May Warren, age nine at commitment, committed from Benton County for incorrigibility.

Father deceased, mother whereabouts unknown.

The physical description was brief: brown hair, blue eyes, scar on left hand.

Under disposition, dated April 1883, a single phrase: “Placed out to household of Mrs.

A.

Whitmore, Lafayette.”

Placed out.

The term appeared throughout the registers, attached to hundreds of names.

Margot had encountered it before in her research on orphan trains and children’s aid societies, but she had not known that Indiana’s reformatory operated a similar system.

Girls who demonstrated improvement could be released to private households under contracts that obligated them to domestic service in exchange for room, board, and theoretically, a moral upbringing.

The reformatory called it rehabilitation.

The contracts called it indenture.

Mrs.

A.

Whitmore.

The name was familiar.

Margot returned to the Whitmore collection and found it again and again.

Annette Whitmore, wife of Thomas Whitmore, farmer and later hardware merchant.

Aunt Netty in the penciled inscription.

The woman in the chair.

The 1880 census showed the Whitmore household: Thomas, Annette, and their three grown sons, all of whom had moved to separate properties by 1883.

The 1885 state census added one name: Elsie Warren, age 12, listed under occupation as “domestic.”

So Elsie had stayed.

She had been placed out to the Whitmore household in April 1883, and by June of that same year, Annette Whitmore had taken her to JW Carpenter’s studio to have their portrait made together.

The photographer had arranged them in poses suggesting intimacy, affection, family connection—and Elsie had stood there in her reformatory shoes, the numbers pressed into the leather where anyone who looked closely enough could see.

 

IV.

Understanding the System: Labor Disguised as Salvation

Margot needed to understand the system, not just the individual case.

She reached out to Dr.

Lena Bradford, a historian at Indiana University who specialized in 19th-century child welfare and had written extensively on the reformatory movement.

They met in Dr.

Bradford’s office, a small room overflowing with books and photocopies and a single potted fern struggling toward the window.

Margot showed her the photograph.

Dr.

Bradford examined it for a long time without speaking.

“The shoes are remarkable,” she said finally.

“I have seen references to marked clothing in institutional records, but I have never seen photographic evidence of a child wearing it outside the reformatory walls.

This is, as far as I know, unique.”

She explained the context.

The Indiana Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls had been founded in 1873, the first such institution in the country.

Its mission was ostensibly rehabilitative.

Girls committed to the reformatory were to be reformed through labor, education, and religious instruction.

In practice, Dr.

Bradford said, the institution served multiple functions.

It warehoused girls whose families could not support them.

It punished girls whose behavior violated emerging middle-class norms of femininity.

And it supplied domestic labor to households willing to take on the responsibility of continued supervision.

The placing out system was central to the reformatory’s operation.

The institution was chronically overcrowded and underfunded.

Releasing girls to private households reduced the population and expenses while also, in theory, completing the work of reform by immersing the girl in a proper domestic environment.

The contracts were explicit.

The girl was to provide household labor.

The household was to provide moral guidance and the basics of life.

The reformatory retained the right to recall the girl if the placement failed.

The language is revealing, Dr.

Bradford said.

“The contracts speak of service and guidance, but the economic relationship is clear.

These girls were a source of unpaid labor.

The households that took them received something valuable.

The girls received at best a roof and meals.

At worst, they received something much darker.”

She explained how the system had evolved.

In the reformatory’s early years, the focus had been on institutional labor.

Girls worked in the laundry, the kitchen, the sewing room.

The institution boasted in its annual reports that no money was spent on hired servants because all work was performed by inmates.

But as the population grew and funding remained inadequate, the placing out system became central to the institution’s operations.

By the 1880s, dozens of girls were being released each year to households across Indiana.

The contracts followed a standard form.

The household agreed to provide room, board, and moral instruction.

The girl agreed to perform domestic labor until she reached the age of 18 or was otherwise discharged.

The reformatory retained legal guardianship and could recall the girl at any time.

In practice, this meant the girl had no recourse if the placement was abusive.

She could not leave without the reformatory’s permission.

She could not complain without risking return to the institution.

She was bound by a contract she had never signed, written in language she might not understand, enforced by a system that saw her labor as the price of her rehabilitation.

The reformatory’s founders believed they were doing good, Dr.

Bradford said.

They genuinely thought they were rescuing these girls from lives of crime and poverty.

But the system they created was exploitative by design.

It took girls who had committed no crime or only the most minor offenses and turned them into a labor force.

It dressed up servitude as salvation and called it reform.

She pulled a folder from her desk.

Inside were photocopies of newspaper clippings from the 1880s and 1890s: reports of girls who had run away from placements, reports of girls who had been returned to the reformatory for unspecified misconduct, and occasionally reports of girls who had been injured or worse in the households meant to reform them.

The reformatory’s own annual reports boasted about the placing out system, Dr.

Bradford continued.

They claimed success rates of 80% or higher, but success was defined by the household, not the girl.

If the household was satisfied, the placement was a success.

The girl’s experience was rarely recorded.

 

V.

The Hidden Labor of Respectable Households

Margot thought of the photograph: Aunt Netty’s serene expression, Elsie’s stillness, the shoes.

The Whitmore household left more traces than most.

The family had been prominent enough to appear regularly in the Lafayette newspapers.

Thomas Whitmore served on the school board.

Annette Whitmore was active in the Ladies Aid Society at the Methodist church.

Their sons married local women and had children of their own.

The Whitmores were, by every public measure, respectable people.

Margot found Thomas Whitmore’s probate records from 1891.

His estate included the farm, the hardware business, and a detailed inventory of household goods.

Among the listings: beds, chairs, a piano, a sewing machine, and one entry that made Margot pause—“Sundry articles for girl’s room, value $5.”

The language was innocuous.

It could have referred to anyone, but in the context of everything Margot had learned, it raised questions.

Had Elsie been given her own room? Had it been furnished with castoffs worth only $5 at auction? Had she slept in the main house or in some outbuilding? The inventory could not say.

What Margot did find was a reference to Elsie in a church record from 1886—a baptism certificate listing Elsie Warren as a member received into the congregation, sponsored by Mrs.

Annette Whitmore.

And then in 1889, a marriage record: Elsie Warren, age 16, married to James Fenton, laborer of Tippecanoe County.

She had survived.

She had left the Whitmore household, married, and presumably started a life of her own.

Margot felt a measure of relief, though she knew better than to assume that survival meant happiness.

She traced the Fenton family through subsequent censuses.

James and Elsie had four children between 1890 and 1901.

They moved frequently—from Lafayette to Crawfordsville to Terre Haute—following whatever work James could find.

The 1900 census listed his occupation as day laborer.

Elsie had no occupation listed, though in all likelihood she took in washing or sewing to supplement the family income, as so many women of her class did.

By 1910, James had died of tuberculosis at the age of 37.

Elsie was listed as head of household, working as a laundress.

Her eldest daughter, 14 years old, was also working, listed as a domestic servant in a neighboring household.

The pattern repeated itself.

Elsie’s daughter had entered service at the same age Elsie herself had been when she was placed out to the Whitmores.

Not through the reformatory, not through a formal contract, but through the same economic necessity that had shaped her mother’s life.

The system did not need institutions to perpetuate itself.

Poverty was enough.

By 1920, Elsie was living with her eldest daughter’s family, listed as “mother” with no occupation.

She died in 1934 at age 61 and was buried in a small cemetery outside Crawfordsville.

Her grave marker, if it ever existed, was gone by the time Margot went looking for it.

Only her name remained in the cemetery records, misspelled as “Elsa.”

There was no diary, no collection of letters, no recorded account of her years in the reformatory or the Whitmore household.

Whatever Elsie had felt standing in that studio in 1883 wearing those shoes was lost.

Only the image remained—and the marks on the leather.

 

VI.

Evidence in the Details: Reading the Shoes

But the image itself was evidence.

And Margot was not the only one who could read it.

She brought the photograph to an expert in 19th-century clothing and footwear, a curator at the Chicago History Museum named Patricia Odum.

Patricia examined the shoes under magnification for nearly an hour.

When she was finished, she confirmed what Margot had suspected.

“These are institutional issue,” she said.

“The style is wrong for the period.

They are functional, not fashionable.

The leather is cheap.

And the sizing, as you noticed, is completely wrong for the girl.

Institutions bought in bulk.

They distributed what they had.

A girl might wear shoes three sizes too large rather than go barefoot.”

She pointed to another detail Margot had missed.

The buttons on the shoes were mismatched.

One side had six buttons, the other had five with an empty hole where the sixth should be.

The shoes had been repaired, probably multiple times, with whatever materials were available.

Whoever dressed this girl for the photograph did not think to replace the shoes, Patricia said, or could not—or perhaps did not care.

The dress is clearly borrowed or new.

The hair is carefully arranged.

But the shoes—the shoes are an afterthought.

Or a statement, Margot thought.

A reminder.

The reformatory’s mark visible to anyone who knew to look.

 

VII.

The Debate Over Memory and Responsibility

The Indiana Historical Society had policies about new acquisitions.

Objects and photographs were cataloged, assessed for significance, and then either added to the permanent collection or returned to the donor.

The Whitmore collection as a whole was unremarkable.

Family photographs of local interest, nothing more.

But the photograph of Elsie Warren was different.

It was evidence of a system that had operated in plain sight for decades—a system that had placed hundreds of girls into households across Indiana under the guise of rehabilitation while extracting their labor and erasing their histories.

The shoes were a material link to that system, a physical trace of institutional control that had somehow survived into the present.

Margot wrote a memo to the acquisitions committee.

She recommended that the photograph be added to the permanent collection and that research continue into the placing out system and its effects on the girls who passed through it.

She attached her preliminary findings and a high-resolution scan of the cabinet card.

The committee’s response was cautious.

The photograph was historically interesting, yes, but its significance was unclear.

The Whitmore family had donated the collection in good faith, expecting their ancestors to be remembered positively.

A public interpretation that cast Annette Whitmore as a participant in child exploitation might be unwelcome.

There were also questions of evidence.

The shoes could be read multiple ways.

Perhaps Elsie had simply been poor.

Perhaps the marking was a coincidence.

One committee member, a retired banker who had served on the board for decades, was blunt.

> “We cannot accuse a respected family of something like this based on a pair of shoes.

The Whitmores built half this county.

Their descendants still donate to this institution.”

Another member, younger, a professor of public history at a local university, pushed back.

> “We are not accusing anyone.

We are documenting a system.

The Whitmores may have been kind to this girl.

That does not change the fact that they participated in a system that was by any modern standard exploitative.

If we cannot acknowledge that, what is our purpose?”

The debate continued for weeks.

Margot attended meetings, answered questions, and tried to navigate between the competing pressures.

The historical society depended on donations from families like the Whitmores.

But it also had a responsibility to historical truth, even when that truth was uncomfortable.

Margot understood the concerns.

She also understood what was at stake.

Institutions like the reformatory had operated for decades, had affected thousands of lives, and had left almost no trace in public memory.

The girls who had passed through the system had grown old and died.

Their descendants, if they existed, likely knew nothing of their ancestors’ experiences.

The photograph of Elsie Warren was not just an image.

It was a call to look more carefully at what had been hidden in plain sight.

 

VIII.

The Families Remember and Reconnect

She found an ally in the unlikeliest place.

The 92-year-old woman in Phoenix, Margaret Whitmore Sanchez, was Annette Whitmore’s great-great-granddaughter.

When Margot called to ask about the collection, Margaret was initially confused.

She had sent the photographs to be preserved, not examined.

But as Margot explained what she had found, Margaret fell silent.

> “The Warren girl,” she said finally.

“My grandmother used to talk about her, not by name, just the girl Netty took in.

She said Netty was kind to her, gave her a home when she had none.”

> “Do you know anything else about her? About Elsie?”

There was a long pause.

> “My grandmother had a photograph,” Margaret said—a different one.

“I think I still have it somewhere.” She said the girl had come from the state school, that Netty had rescued her.

The word hung in the air—rescued.

It was the narrative the Whitmore family had told themselves for over a century.

Netty had rescued a poor girl from a terrible institution.

She had given her a home, brought her to church, seen her married—a story of charity and redemption.

But the shoes told a different story.

They told a story of a system that had commodified children, that had dressed up servitude as salvation, that had marked its inmates with inventory numbers, and sent them out into the world bearing the state’s claim on their bodies.

Whatever kindness Annette Whitmore might have shown, she had also participated in that system.

She had taken a child from an institution, put her to work in her household, and posed with her for a portrait that would celebrate the respectability of the arrangement.

Margaret Sanchez was quiet for a long time.

When she spoke again, her voice was different, softer, more uncertain.

> “I would like to know more,” she said.

“About Elsie, about what really happened.

If you find anything, will you tell me?”

Margot found the second photograph.

Three weeks later, Margaret had located it in a box of her grandmother’s papers and mailed it to the historical society.

It was smaller than the cabinet card, a carte de visite from an earlier decade.

The image showed a group of girls standing in rows before a large brick building.

They wore identical dark dresses.

Their hair was cropped short.

Some looked at the camera, others looked at the ground.

On the back in faded ink, someone had written: “Indiana Reformatory, 1881, presented to Board of Visitors.”

The building in the photograph matched descriptions of the reformatory’s main facility in Indianapolis.

The girls were inmates assembled for an official portrait meant to demonstrate the institution’s orderly operation.

Their faces were indistinct, blurred by time and the limitations of the camera.

But in the second row, near the center, was a girl with her left hand slightly raised.

On that hand, barely visible, was a scar.

Elsie Warren had been photographed twice—once as an inmate, anonymous and interchangeable, one of dozens of girls arranged to showcase institutional discipline, and once as a member of a household, posed beside the woman who controlled her labor, wearing shoes that still bore the state’s mark.

The two images together told a story that neither could tell alone.

They documented a journey from institution to household, from one form of control to another.

They showed how a girl could be transformed in the space of a few years and a few miles from a numbered inmate to a baptized church member without ever fully escaping the system that had claimed her.

 

IX.

The System’s Legacy—and the Power of Photographs

The Indiana Historical Society eventually added both photographs to its permanent collection.

The acquisitions committee had been persuaded not by Margot’s arguments alone, but by the response to a preliminary exhibition she organized with Dr.

Bradford’s help.

The exhibition, titled *Placed Out: Labor and the Indiana Reformatory*, drew visitors from across the state.

Descendants of reformatory inmates contacted the society, sharing their own family photographs and documents.

Historians and archivists began to examine other collections with new eyes, looking for evidence of the placing out system that might have been overlooked.

Margaret Sanchez came to the exhibition’s opening.

She walked slowly through the galleries, pausing before each panel, each photograph, each excerpt from the reformatory’s records.

When she reached the cabinet card of Elsie Warren and Annette Whitmore, she stood for a long time without speaking.

> “I always thought Netty was a good woman,” she said finally.

“I still think she might have been, in her way, but I understand now that goodness is not enough.

She was part of something larger, something that used children like currency, and I never knew.”

She turned to Margot.

> “What happened to Elsie’s descendants? Do they know about this?”

Margot had traced the Fenton line forward.

Elsie’s great-granddaughter, a woman named Diana Fenton Clark, lived in Indianapolis.

She had been contacted.

She was coming to the exhibition.

Diana arrived on the exhibition’s final day.

She was in her sixties, a retired school teacher, and she had brought a folder of her own.

Inside were documents she had found in her grandmother’s papers—a marriage certificate, a baptism record, and a single handwritten note, undated, in a child’s careful script.

The note read:
“I am Elsie Warren.

I was born in Benton County in 1873.

I was sent away when I was nine.

I came back when I was sixteen.

I am writing this so I will not forget.”

Diana had never understood what the note meant.

Her grandmother, Elsie’s daughter, had refused to discuss it.

The family knew vaguely that there had been some trouble in Elsie’s childhood, some period she had spent away from home, but the details had been lost.

Seeing the photographs, reading the exhibition panels, Diana finally understood.

> “She wrote it so she would not forget,” Diana said.

“But we forgot anyway.

We lost her story and now it is coming back.”

She and Margaret Sanchez stood together before the cabinet card—two women whose families had been connected more than a century ago by a system that had erased the girls it claimed to save.

They did not know each other.

They had nothing in common except this: a photograph, a pair of shoes, and a girl who had tried to leave a record of her own existence.

 

X.

Old Photographs and Unfinished Reckonings

There are thousands of photographs like this one—cabinet cards in attics and archives, images of households that included children whose presence was never explained.

Some of those children were relatives, some orphans, some servants, and some were girls like Elsie Warren, placed out from reformatories and industrial schools, their labor exchanged for the promise of reform.

The Indiana Reformatory was not unique.

Similar institutions existed in nearly every state.

Massachusetts opened the first reform school for boys in 1848.

New York followed with a house of refuge that processed thousands of children each year.

Girls’ reformatories proliferated after the Civil War, driven by anxieties about female sexuality, urban poverty, and the perceived breakdown of the family.

The placing out system was national in scope.

Children from eastern cities were shipped to western farms.

Children from southern institutions were bound to households that resembled in all but name the plantations their parents had escaped.

The language varied—indenture, placing out, binding out, apprenticeship, rescue.

But the structure was the same.

Children who had no power, no representation, and often no one to speak for them were transferred from institutions to households under contracts that gave the households almost total control.

The children worked.

The households profited.

The institutions declared success.

The shoes in the photograph were a failure of concealment.

Someone had neglected to replace them or had not thought it mattered or had assumed that no one would ever look closely enough to see.

But the marks remained.

The institution’s claim on Elsie’s body was still visible, pressed into the leather, waiting for someone to notice.

 

XI.

What Old Photographs Can Do

This is what old photographs can do if we let them.

They can reveal the systems that shaped ordinary lives.

They can show us who was included in the family portrait and who was positioned at its edges.

They can expose the violence hidden beneath the language of charity and the arrangement of respectable poses.

And they can return to us the names and faces of people who were never meant to be remembered.

Elsie Warren died in 1934.

She lived sixty-one years.

She raised four children.

She worked as a laundress after her husband died.

She wrote a single note trying to hold on to her own history.

And she stood once in a photography studio in Lafayette, Indiana, wearing shoes that were too big and marked with a number while a woman in a carved wooden chair looked serenely at the camera.

The photograph survived.

The shoes did not, but their imprint remains—if you look closely enough to see.