Research

Scope and Content Note

Meeting minutes, kept by the Board of Managers' secretary, deal primarily with planning, budgeting, and reviewing expenditures for salaries, supplies, and services. The entry for each meeting usually contains a list of monthly expenditures, which was submitted by the Superintendent and audited and ordered paid by the committee. Names of staff who were hired, fired, or who had resigned are also included in the minutes.

Beginning in the 1870s, the minutes contain reports and recommendations presented to the committee by the superintendent on the admission or discharge of specific individuals. The superintendent frequently recommended the transfer of a disruptive inmate to criminal court jurisdiction for incarceration in the Monroe County Jail. Minutes are handwritten until January 1895, and thereafter are typewritten.