The Children’s Mission of Boston:
1849-1960

By Frank E. Robertson

By the 1840s, Unitarians of Boston had established several special Sunday schools to educate poor children who worked in the mills and along the wharfs during the week when other children attended day schools. Those schools on Sundays not only taught the three Rs and religion, but they also provided the children with clothes, food aid, and job training. But there was one desperate need not being met. What should be done with the many orphans who had lost their parents or had run away from abusive parents and roamed in the city streets? Many such orphans took to criminal activity, stealing from shops and homes, bringing the stolen goods to unscrupulous merchants and exchanging them for food or alcohol. The jails were full of them.

One spring day in 1849, a girl named Fanny S. Merrill was with her father who was attending a meeting to discuss the problem of homeless children. It was held at the Howard Sunday School in Boston, at the Pitt Street Chapel. Fanny sat quietly and listened as the adults told story after story about those poor desperate children and how the jails and orphanages were miserable places that seemed only to make matters worse. At a crucial point in the discussion when no one seemed to offer a reasonable solution to the problem, she said to her father: “Father, can’t we children do something to help those poor little ones?”

Out of that question grew the idea of establishing a children’s mission to help homeless children, funded by the children of the dozens of Sunday schools in Boston and the surrounding towns. The mission would reach out to the orphan children, provide a Sunday school and safe temporary home for them, and help them find good families out in the country who would take them in as their own.

Fanny said that she would be willing to bring in some of her pennies each week to Sunday school for a children’s mission, and she thought most of the other children would do likewise once they heard of the miserable lives the street children of Boston were living. If hundreds of children from the Sunday schools helped, perhaps even thousands, the money they could collect each week would add up to a tidy sum!

She and her father and the others at the meeting went to the Sunday schools to ask their help. The response was tremendous! Mission boxes were made for each Sunday school and the children promised to bring in at least one penny each Sunday to support their new mission project. The Sunday School Society loved the idea too and invited the children in Unitarian Sunday schools across the continent to support the children’s mission. Thousands of children pledged to help. This was how the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute of Boston was started.

An organization was formed and a young husband-and-wife couple, Joseph E. and Elizabeth D. Barry, were hired to head the program. Joseph was paid by the Children’s Mission funds and Elizabeth was paid by the Benevolent Fraternity of Unitarian Churches of Boston, which had been supporting the special Sunday schools for poor children.

The choice of the Barrys was most fortuitous because they would prove to be very wise and courageous leaders, who would dedicate their lives to the cause, and struggle to establish a successful program in the most difficult of circumstances, reaching out to children who most people felt were so hard to handle that jail seemed to be the best place for them. They set up a center, first located on Utica Street in Boston, to house the homeless children with a special Sunday school. Then they walked the streets and visited the jails, gathering in those homeless children who would come to live at their center and who expressed a willingness to change their bad habits and prepare themselves for a new life far away from the troubled street life they had been used to. Imagine the job they had, reaching out to children and youth who had grown to trust no one and were in the habit of begging, or even stealing, in order to survive!

In one report, Elizabeth Barry wrote: “There came to my house, Jan. 12, 1856, a beautiful child, twelve years of age. I had known him for four years to be an honest boy. My husband and I had made every effort to place him in the country, away from his mother, whom vice and self-indulgence had ruined. She was in the habit of sending him from house to house for cold victuals, clothing, money, or any thing else which he could get; and, when he came home, she would sell what she could, and send him out for rum, drink it, and give it to her little girl of six years; and perhaps this boy would again, at the hour of midnight, be called up to go to the druggist, to say his mother was sick, and get more. Such was the experience of this little boy, who fled to me for refuge from a blow which his mother gave him with an axe. I sent him away into the country with a wealthy gentleman, who has promised to take care of him; and, as he was leaving me, he said, ‘Mrs. Ba! rry, be sure to get my little sister and brother away from my mother as soon as you can... .’” (1)

The Barrys faced another challenge. The Unitarians of Boston at that time were the overwhelming majority of the citizenry and some people in the other faith groups were jealous of them. Also, most of the poor homeless children of Boston had come from recent immigrants to the city and were Roman Catholics or people of other Protestant faiths. No matter how much the Barrys tried to respect the other religions of the city, they were looked upon as missionaries out to convert people to Unitarian Christianity.

During 1850, the number of children attending the Barry’s Sunday school at the Children’s Mission suddenly dropped from 125 to 30 in three week’s time. The First Annual Report of the Children’s Mission tells the reason why:

“The falling-off in the Sunday school in East-street began as follows: Two Catholic men and two women came to the school-house, before the doors were opened, one Sunday afternoon, and took their position on the steps. As the boys and girls approached to enter the school, they were asked if they were Catholics; and, if they answered in the affirmative, they were sent away. Your missionary [Joseph Barry] was accused of extorting money from the Catholics, to give him the means of making proselytes among them to Protestantism. The children, taught by the example of their elders, became bold and insolent. Stones and mud were thrown, not only at the doors and windows of the schoolhouse, but Mr. Barry was more than once assaulted in like manner, as he passed along the streets. The school was so much interrupted for seven weeks, that police-officers were stationed in front of the building to keep the peace.” (2)

The needs of the homeless children were what really mattered most to the Barrys; and, when Roman Catholics built their orphanage called “Angel House” in 1853, the Barrys praised their efforts and sometimes brought homeless children from Catholic families to Angel House. They also encouraged children from stable families who were not yet attending Sunday school to attend other schools around the city.

Of course, the Barrys and others who helped them continued their efforts to help orphans and runaways in the city and the Children’s Mission flourished. As stories about their work were read in the Unitarian children’s magazine of the period, The Sunday School Gazette, more and more children joined the cause. By 1867 enough money was sent in to build an impressive four-story building complex on Tremont Street. One can view those buildings in Figure 1. In them there were rooms for children and a hired Matron to live in, a chapel, classrooms, and offices for the staff and volunteers. A second building was added to the Children’s Mission in 1890 just to house the youngest children. One can see that building below the main building in Figure 1 and some of those younger children at play in Figure 2.

Joseph Barry traveled around to the churches and farms of New England seeking suitable families who would adopt or take in as foster children the homeless children. He made several trips our west to Ohio, Illinois, and Minnesota searching for such families. Long lists of children needing homes were published in The Sunday School Gazette, without their names. The lists entitled “Children Needing Homes” read something like this: a girl age six, a boy age six, a girl age seven, etc. (3)

The Barrys and other staff people were very careful about the homes they selected. When the children were moved to their new families, letters were written to them and to their new parents to see how they were doing. In a few cases, children had to be removed because things were not working out well. Either a child was causing trouble with a family or the new parents were simply using the child as a servant or farm laborer without pay. Children placed by the Children’s Mission were supposed to become members of their new family, go to school and Sunday school, do a reasonable amount of chores, have their own room, and be treated like any other child in that family. On the other hand, the annual reports of the Children’s Mission indicate that almost all of the children placed were successful placements and the program was highly respected by Unitarians and others throughout its long history.

Information about Elizabeth Barry’s work in her later years has not yet been found, but the records indicate that Joseph Barry served the Children’s Mission as its missionary and superintendent until 1877 and still worked as a missionary until 1899, after which he was designated as “honorary missionary” until his death in 1912. William Crosby took over as the superintendent in 1877.

As child labor laws were passed, restricting children from working during weekday school hours, and government social services developed during the first half of the 20th century, the special children’s Sunday schools closed and the adoption of orphans became less and less the work of the Children’s Mission. By 1920, the Children’s Mission had sold its old building and moved to Ashburton Place. In the 1950s it was located at 318 Longwood Avenue. Its program shifted away from working primarily with orphans to helping poor children obtain medical care when they needed it. In the 1950s, Dr. Benedict F. Massell was its Medical Director and the Children’s Mission to Children (a new name adopted in 1913) became “a unit of the Children’s Medical Center” of Boston.(4) The last brochures or reports to be found in the archives of the Andover-Harvard Library related the Children’s Mission date from the 1950s and the program was listed in the Yearbooks of the American Unitarian Association up to the time of merger in 1961.

Think of the thousands and thousands of desperately poor homeless children who were helped to find a better life over more than one hundred years of the existence of the Children’s Mission. It is a story about which all Unitarian Universalists of today can be proud. Hopefully it will help to inspire new generations of church school children to ask questions like Fanny Merrill asked long ago and discover new missions to create for the benefit of humankind.

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Notes:

1. Elizabeth Barry’s 1856 report to the Executive Committee of the Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, p. 27, Andover-Harvard Library copy.
2. First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute, Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 124 Washington St., 1850, p. 7.
3. See the August 16, 1851 issue of The Sunday School Gazette and occasional subsequent issues. The name was changed to Dayspring in 1872. Most copies are available on microfilm at the Andover-Harvard Library.
4. 1951 Pamphlet entitled “Convalescent Foster Home Care” published by The Children’s Mission to Children in the collections of the Andover-Harvard Library.