Thomas Indian School

Thomas Indian School occupies a campus on Route 438 on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in Irving, New York. The State built it in 1900 to a plan by the New York architects Barney and Chapman. Nine red brick buildings, including an Administration Building, four dormitories, a schoolhouse and an infirmary, face a main driveway, with more than twenty-five farm and vocational outbuildings behind them. The Administration Building carries Indian statues in niches and garlands of wheat and corn. Trees were planted in circles between the dormitories. The institution began about fifty years earlier as an asylum for homeless Indian children, run by Rev. and Mrs. Asher Wright with help from Philip E. Thomas, and the State took over its support in 1875. It later became an accredited school and the social center of the reservation. It closed in 1958 as pupils moved into nearby public schools. At nomination, only the Infirmary was in use and local Indians hoped to rehabilitate the rest.