Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2022

The Women’s Reformatory began in Shakopee, Minnesota in 1920. They purchased 167 acres of land at the edge of Shakopee.

More than twenty firms bid to build a barn at the State Reformatory for Women. P.J. Gallagher would build the barn for $414, according to the Shakopee Tribune, Oct. 6, 1921.

Nobody wants to be forgotten.

Four tombstones are at the Catholic Cemetery.

Prison staff helped to identify who was buried there — two inmates and two infant children of offenders from the old State Reformatory for Women in Shakopee.

Three of the deceased died in the 1920s and the fourth died in 1954.

The old gravestones were only marked by prison inmate numbers.

In 2014, inmates committed to raising funds to purchase four proper headstones for the cemetery.

Through freewill offerings, the inmates raised enough money to the markers, and offenders in the Challenge Incarceration Program, an intense boot-camp program to rehabilitate non-violent offenders, placed each headstone at an event on Nov. 18, 2014.

Bert Schumacher was born by an inmate on Aug. 12, 1922. A little over one month later, he died. Now, Bert has a tombstone at the Catholic Cemetery.

“Today we acknowledge four almost-forgotten souls. Their lives clearly were not lived to their greatest potential, their dreams and aspirations probably unfulfilled,” said Department of Correction Commissioner Tom Roy.

The prison is now called the Minnesota Correctional Facility — Shakopee.

And as they added the tombstones, Tom Roy noted, “But they did walk the face of this earth, breathe this air as we do now, so many years later.”