Black History Month: Former resident looks back on his days in Vigo County’s ‘colored orphans home’

By Arthur Foulkes

Terre Haute — James Anderson lived at the “colored orphans home” east of Terre Haute more than 60 years ago, but looking out over the wooded and hilly landscape where he spent much of his childhood, it “almost seems like yesterday,” he said.

“I can almost hear the laughing and see the kids running and playing,” Anderson said looking back in time while standing outside the now-abandoned facility near Hunt Road north of U.S. 40.

Anderson was in the first group of four young boys to be placed in the “new colored orphanage” at the Vigo County Home for Dependent Children when he was about 9 years old in the mid-1930s.

His mother having died of tuberculosis when he was 4, Anderson, then the youngest surviving child in his family, lived with foster families prior to being placed in the orphanage, where he remained until he was 16, he said. One of his four older sisters, whom Anderson had lived with in his foster home, was placed in the orphanage at the same time. Two other sisters were adopted and another had gotten married before the orphanage was opened, he said.

Prior to 1936, another building was used to house black children at the Glenn Home, according to Jennifer Krockenberger, who has studied the history of the Glenn orphanage and has a Web site dedicated to the subject, www.

glennhome.homestead.com. This original “colored orphans” cottage, which was about 150 yards from the main Glenn Home building, still stands today on property used by Rose-Hulman’s Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

The 1936 “colored orphanage” building, later used as the Vigo County Juvenile Center, was closed in the 1960s when the Glenn Home was integrated. It is now an abandoned and badly vandalized structure.

In Anderson’s time at the Glenn Home, the white and black orphanages were separated by a small valley and a creek, but Anderson would walk to the “white orphanage” every day to fetch milk with another boy from the black orphanage, he said. Eventually, he said, “they gave us two cows,” making the daily walk unnecessary. Apart from that, the only contact the black orphans had with their white counterparts was on special occasions, such as Christmas when the local Elks club would sponsor a party.

“Each one of us would get a [Christmas] present,” Anderson recalled, adding that it could not cost more than $5, which “was quite a lot back then,” he said. One Christmas he received a guitar, he remembers. Anderson also recalls watching Christmas magic shows performed in the gymnasium at the “white orphanage” by local magician Jimmy Trimble.

The caretaker of the “colored” facility in Anderson’s time was a Lee Harrison and his wife, Mary, whom Anderson kept in touch with until their deaths.

If kids misbehaved, they would be paddled or put in a room the children called the “cooler,” which was a room on the front of the building where you could see the other kids playing outside, he said.

“We’d play basketball” indoors in the winter, Anderson said, adding that “we didn’t even have a basketball net” or a real basketball. They would make do with another ball and throw it over a water pipe in the ceiling. “You know how kids are inventive,” he said.

The “white” orphans home, on the other hand, had its own gymnasium, a building that still stands today on the Pi Kappa Alpha grounds.

In addition to softball, volleyball and other outdoor activities, Anderson recalls on hot days the older girls would take the younger kids into the shade of the nearby orchard and read to them. He remembers hearing all the “old classics,” such as Tom Sawyer, he said. Additionally, local families donated many books to the black orphanage and one man, whose son stayed at the orphanage, would bring 78 records for the kids to listen to.

“We’d listen to the same records over and over,” Anderson said with a laugh.

There were 40 black children and 66 white children at the Glenn Home around 1939, according to a Terre Haute newspaper article on file at the Vigo County Public Library. The black children attended elementary school at one of two black schools in Lost Creek, while the white kids attended the Glenn Home School, the article stated.

Anderson remembers Harry Batton or his wife driving the kids from the “colored orphanage” to school in Lost Creek, he said. Batton would take the kids to school in his car before eventually getting a school bus, Anderson said.

George Weisbach was the superintendent of the Glenn Home, both the white and black facilities, during Anderson’s time there in the 1930s and ’40s. He remembers the Weisbachs wanting the kids to feel that they were “as good as anyone else,” Anderson said. “Mr. Weisbach would say, ‘Don’t you ever feel like you have to be mistreated by anybody. You can come to me personally,’” Anderson recalled.

Despite that, Anderson remembers feeling a little “ashamed, you know, being an orphan” when the Harrisons would take the children out in public, such as to events at Memorial Stadium. He also remembers the sometimes sad occasions when children at the home would be adopted out or would leave when they had reached adulthood. He remembers the sad feeling the children had when three young girls — Jean, June and “baby Martha” — were taken from the home by family members. “Boy, that was a big loss,” Anderson said.

Anderson stayed at the Glenn Home until he was 16, he said. He then moved in with relatives and eventually joined the Army, in which he served for more than 20 years. He returned to Terre Haute in the late 1960s and started a 20-year career at Pillsbury.

Other people Anderson would meet later in life who had been orphans at other facilities around the country often described their experiences as if they had been “in prison,” he said. It was not like that at the Glenn Home, he said.

“The treatment I received there … I have no complaints about it,” Anderson said. “I was treated well. I learned a few things about life.”

The food was “very good, because we had very good cooks,” he said. A local judge, whose court oversaw the Glenn Home, often found reasons to visit the black orphanage at meal time after he discovered that Mrs. Harrison was such a good cook, Anderson said.

They also had a radio at the home that the Harrisons would listen to. Sometimes, Anderson said, he and the other children would lay on the floor outside the Harrisons’ office, secretly listening to radio programs. Eventually, however, one kid would always make a noise and Mr. Harrison would yell, “What’s going on out there?” and “we’d all scatter,” he said with a laugh.

“It was like you had left home,” Anderson said of the day he left the Glenn Home in the 1940s. He kept in touch with several people he met there and, until recently, still exchanged Christmas cards with one of the original four boys who also came to the orphanage when it first opened. Another young boy from the home lives just a few blocks from Anderson today, he said.

“I had a very good experience in the orphans’ home,” Anderson said. “We were really kind of like a family.”

Arthur Foulkes can be contacted at (812) 231-4232 or arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com.

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