Orphanages

Orphanages, public or private institutions for the care of children without parents, date to ancient times.Charity for parentless children is mentioned in the New Testament and is included in Jewish and Islamic religious law. Christian monasteries and convents assumed this role in the Middle Ages to discourage the abandonment of children and unwanted infants. Protestant churches continued this work of mercy, inspiring governments to provide for orphans. By 1550, orphanages were combined with educational reform in England, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland.

The orphanage appeared early in America when an English philanthropist, James Oglethorpe, established Georgia as a proprietary colony in 1732 and as a refugee for English orphans and paupers. But orphan asylums were rare because all British colonies enforced the English Poor Law of 1601, which gave orphans and other worthy poor persons a legal right to assistance from the state. Transplanted to the New World, the Elizabethan social welfare system relied on the family and the local government to care for orphans.

Colonial Era orphans were typically apprenticed by the town selectmen (the overseers of the poor) to craftsmen or farmers to learn a trade in a well‐ordered Christian family. However, by 1780 growing seaports like Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Maryland, had larger, more heterogeneous populations, and not every homeless child could be apprenticed or farmed out. When Boston opened its first alms house in 1660, following the examples of New York (1657) and Plymouth, Massachusetts (1658), children were among the first inmates. By the 1760s, more than one‐quarter of Massachusetts poorhouse residents were minors. Matrons cared for children until they could be apprenticed, sent to live with relatives, or placed as domestic servants. Many citizens, however, criticized the mixing of young children with adult inmates—including the indigent, insane, senile, crippled, diseased, drunken and criminal—as deplorable and unwise.

After the Revolutionary War a new solution appeared when philanthropic ladies and gentlemen established private institutions for orphans. The Boston Female Asylum opened in 1799 to care for young girls, and this example spread to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and most large cities. Public officials cooperated with private charities to reduce the taxpayers' burden. This pattern of genteel private charity continued through the nineteenth century, and each community or denomination demonstrated its humanitarianism by operating a wide variety of orphanages and charities.

The Civil War disrupted family life in every community, placing a heavy burden on both private and public charities. Many Northern states established orphanages to care for the children of soldiers, including half‐orphans, a child with only one surviving parent. In 1864 a group of Boston Methodists founded the New England Home for Little Wanderers as a response to poverty and social disorder on the Civil War homefront. This regional orphanage cared for hundreds of boys and girls each year and developed into a large congregate asylum and (by 1900) a modern, professional child‐welfare institution. Like most orphanages, it was racially segregated.

Religious rivalry prompted each denomination to sponsor its own orphanage, often to counter proselytizing or “child stealing” from one sect to another. The Home for Destitute Catholic Children opened in Boston in 1865 in response to the threat that Irish Catholics saw in the Evangelicalism of the New England Home for Little Wanderers. New York City Catholics were similarly motivated by the alleged “child‐snatching” of the nonsectarian New York Children's Aid Society, founded in 1853 by the Reverend Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890), a Congregationalist. Similar competition to rescue orphans arose in most major cities throughout the nineteenth century.

In the Progressive Era, the public and private orphanage was criticized by the new professional social workers as obsolete, expensive, and inhumane. Adoption, foster care, and smaller cottage‐style child‐welfare institutions replaced the large congregate orphanage in many states. Economy‐minded state and federal officials doubted the efficacy of orphanages, and by the time of the New Deal with its social welfare programs, the era of the traditional orphanage was ending, although established institutions remained active in many states into the 1950s. Perhaps America's most famous orphanage was Boys Town, founded in Omaha, Nebraska in 1917 by a Catholic priest. Father Edward J. Flanagan's shelter for homeless and delinquent boys became a self‐governing nonsectarian farm community. The 1938 film, Boys Town, made Flanagan's institution the most beloved (although controversial) orphanage in the United States. This was one reason cited for interest in reviving orphanages in the 1990s, but the opposition of child‐welfare specialists prevailed against the idea.
See also New Deal Era, The; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Social Work; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Joan Gittens , Poor Relations: The Children of the State in Illinois, 1818–1990, 1994.
Peter C. Holloran , Boston's Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830–1930, 1994.
Kenneth Cmiel , A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare, 1995.

Peter C. Holloran