The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them

Chapter Two - Orphans and Orphanages

N THE 1850s, A HARVARD-TRAINED MINISTER named Charles Loring Brace came to the conclusion that cities were dangerous to the moral development of boys and girls. To put his ideas into practice, he developed the placing-out system for transporting neglected and orphaned children from the streets of New York to more wholesome environments in the American West. Brace and his colleagues in the New York Children’s Aid Society sent thousands of children on so-called orphan trains to Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and other states. On the theory that hard work was good for the soul, the society placed children on farms and in homes, where they helped with indoor and outdoor chores. Some of these children flourished and even grew up to be prominent people. Others felt they were hardly more than slaves.1 One of the weaknesses of Brace’s plan was his romantic notion of life in the West. As Marilyn Holt has pointed out in her book The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America, the advocates of the placing-out system failed to recognize the harsh conditions on the frontier or, just as importantly, the pace of urbanization in the western states. Cities like Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis faced many of the same problems as New York. Even the cities of the Far West suffered from the ill effects of rapid population growth and the breakdown of the traditional rural family structure. San Francisco, for example, opened an orphan asylum in 1851.2 Chapter Two Orphans and Orphanages We have on hand a very fine lot of boys of all ages from one month to twelve years of age. We are putting them out in carefully selected homes. They are placed on three months trial. All it costs to get one is the transportation. References required. For terms address Rev. David Gay, 810 Olive Street, St. Louis, Mo., State Superintendent of the Children’s Home Society. —St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 23, 1899 I 23 24 THE DEAD END KIDS oF ST. LoUIS Nineteenth-century St. Louis had a miserably inadequate system for housing society’s cast-offs. Beginning in 1827, the St. Louis Poor House sheltered indigent, infirm, mentally ill, and homeless adults and children of all ages. In 1853, St. Ann’s Foundling Home began taking in mothers and babies under three years of age. After 1861, the city sent infants and toddlers to St. Ann’s, but continued sending older children to the Poor House, where they mingled with society’s most desperate, and sometimes dangerous, outcasts.3 Churches, philanthropists, and concerned women in St. Louis tried to alleviate the problem by creating institutions for the care of homeless Three boys on the crude doorstep of a county poorhouse in 1917. (Used by permission, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia) Orphans and Orphanages 25 children. Mother Rose Philippine Duchesne, a prominent Catholic nun, opened a home for indigent and orphaned girls in 1827. A wealthy Irish businessman named John Mullanphy gave Duchesne and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart a lease on a property on Broadway and Convent streets with the stipulation that they would establish the Mullanphy Orphan Asylum and provide shelter to at least twenty orphans every year. The asylum continued to provide this service until the 1930s.4 In 1834, sixteen women affiliated with various Protestant churches established the St. Louis Protestant Orphan Asylum (POA). Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist congregations supported the women’s efforts. Initially, the women were responding to the crisis created by the cholera epidemic of 1832, which killed 5 percent of the city’s population and left many children parentless. Cholera outbreaks occurred nearly every summer between 1832 and the 1860s, including the terrible epidemic of 1849. In 1850, twenty-one children in the orphanage died of this terrible disease.5 The managers of the POA identified the following criteria for accepting a child: poverty, illness of a parent, death of a parent, or intemperance of the parents. Historians have found that the residents of the POA were the children of boatmen, soldiers, drifters, pioneers, and immigrants. During the Civil War, the POA admitted eighteen children whose fathers were serving in the army. Another thirty-six children arrived during the war as refugees. After the war, the POA merged with the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home and moved to the suburb of Webster Groves.6 Records show that the POA...