Thomas Indian School

About this property

Thomas Indian School, also known as the Thomas Asylum of Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, is a historic school and national historic district located near Irving at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in Erie County, New York. The institution is remembered today both as a significant local institution and as a site of cultural trauma for the Seneca and other Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples. The school was first established in 1855 by Presbyterian missionaries Asher Wright and his wife Laura Wright to house the orphaned and kidnapped Seneca children of the reservation under the federal policy of forced assimilation, one of at least 523 such institutions. It was funded initially by and named for Rochester philanthropists Philip and Mary Thomas. The campus's original wooden buildings were replaced in 1900–1901 with a large Gothic Revival stone complex, which still stands today. Built by New York State as a self-supporting campus and designed by the New York City firm Barney and Chapman, the campus contains the red brick Georgian Revival style main buildings and a multitude of farm and vocational buildings. The campus closed in 1957 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. It now houses Seneca Nation governmental and health complexes, including elder housing and services, with a court building in the former school infirmary. Generations of Seneca children endured harsh discipline, cultural suppression and family separation at the school. At least 2,500 children from various tribes were separated from their families and forced to attend. In May 2025, Gov. Kathy Hochul met with survivors of the school and apologized on behalf of New York State for the atrocities committed there. Numerous works address the stories of former residents of Native American boarding schools in Western New York and Canada, such as Thomas Indian School, Mohawk Institute Residential School (also known as Mohawk Manual Labour School and Mush Hole Indian Residential School) in Brantford, Southern Ontario, Haudenosaunee boarding school, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the impact of those and similar schools on their communities; and community efforts to overcome those impacts. Examples include: the film Unseen Tears: A Documentary on Boarding School Survivors, Ronald James Douglas' graduate thesis titled Documenting ethnic cleansing in North America: Creating Unseen Tears, and the Legacy of Hope Foundation's online media collection: "Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools".

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Erie County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Erie County.

More historic places in New York

Browse all historic places in New York.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

New York history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.