Excerpt from Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Trustees of the Michigan Employment Institution for the Blind: For the Two Years Ending June 30, 1910

The Michigan Employment Institution for the Blind, located at Sagi naw, West Side, is designed to afford necessary instruction and profitable employment to those worthy blind inhabitants of this State, who with reasonable assistance and' encouragement, are able and willing to work. It was established and is governed under the terms of Act No. 169 of the Laws of 1903, approved June 2, 1903, and was Opened at Saginaw, West Side, in November, 1904, under the superintendency of James P. Hamilton, a graduate of Albion College, who was succeeded in that posi tion in 1907 by Mr. Samuel S. Judd, an instructor in the Saginaw Manual Training School, and formally a teacher in the Missouri State School for the Blind at St. Louis. Mr. Frank G. Putnam, a member of the firm of the Saginaw Broom. Company, succeeded Mr. Judd in May, 1910.

Here blind men and women of ordinary health and: strength between the ages of 18 and 60 years are. Taught useful trades and occupations; such as broommaking, carpet and rug weaving, chair-caning, cobbling, piano tuning, and the like; and during a limited term of apprenticeship or pupilage the learners have their board, lodging, washing and instruc tion supplied at the Institution free of charge, for the people of Michigan wish the blind to have an opportunity to become useful and happy citizens, rather than inactive consumers of other people's earnings and savings. The inmates of the Institution may also learn to read books printed in several different forms of raised letters, and to write dotted characters representing letters which they can read by touch for them selves. They also learn to Operate an ordinary typewriter, so as to be able to write their own letters, to seeing correspondents as rapidly and and correctly as seeing people do.

The Institution also maintains a free circulating library for the bene fit of the blind readers of Michigan at their homes, as well as for those who are learning or earning at Saginaw; and the books are distributed as a loan to such readers and later returned to the library by mail free of postage, under an act of Congress passed in 1904. All such readers of any kind of embossed (that is raised) print should apply to the Librarian, Mr. A. M. Shotwell, for such books as they may desire to borrow, for the books are loaned out free of charge for a few weeks at a time to all duly registered readers of such print.

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