A Home of Their Own: The Story of Ohio’s Greatest Orphanage

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Description

The Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Home came into its remarkable life throughout the 1870s, a moral response to the debt owed Ohio families damaged and destroyed by their fealty to the great national struggle just ended the American Civil War. On a desolate hilltop just outside the Green County town of Xenia, Ohio, an entire park-like campus sprang into being. By the turn of the century, a thousand children were housed, clothed, fed, and educated at the place they referred to as the Home. It was once nearly 500 acres containing, among other things, a farm, its own power plant, an extensive trades school, playing fields and total self-sufficiency.

For a hundred years or more, the Home was once one of The usa s most remarkable institutions. Late in the century, then again, powerful shifts in the culture conspired against it. The emerging foster care system and its advocates the use of the negative image of poorly managed institutions, selected figures and statistics, dwindling political strengthen by the once powerful veterans, and a difficult new demographic of seriously disturbed children – all this eroded its once formidable presence.

Historian Edward Lentz s carefully reconstructed history bolstered by dozens of photographs and voices of the children is a compelling story, provoking the question: Will have to we once again believe orphanages as a way of taking care of parentless children?

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