The former Vigo County Home for Dependent Children aka “Glenn Home” sits on a hill overlooking US 40 to the south, about five miles east of Terre Haute. The part of the entrance drive leading off of the highway before it turns northward up the hill was originally the National Road. There are remnants of a bridge west of the curve in the drive leading up the slope. The Vigo County Home for Dependent Children began as a cohesive cluster of buildings influenced by the Georgian Revival style, placed in a hilltop campus setting. The property features a number of mature deciduous trees that likely were planted at the time of initial construction. The original dormitory buildings are gone, but the main building, constructed in 1896, survives. Northwest of the main building, the former boiler house that once provided heat for all the buildings on the campus is overgrown with vines, but not quiet the ruin it at first appears to be. Clustered around the main building and the boiler house are three postwar dormitories, a former hospital / treatment center to the north, a gymnasium built in 1926 and a few outbuildings.
As a significant remnant of the county’s first children’s guardian home, established in 1903 as a temporary shelter for unwanted, neglected, orphaned, or abused children, the Vigo County Home for Dependent Children has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It represents the movement prevalent during the Progressive Era for reform in the area of child welfare.
When it opened in 1903, the Vigo County Home for Dependent Children was highly touted as—and likely was—one of the best in the state. Built on the so-called “cottage plan”, the institution consisted of an administration building that contained offices and housing for staff, and three dormitories, each of which had a large day room in addition to sleeping quarters. The architect was Martin Miller, about whom records are frustratingly absent. He may have had some connection with the firm of Miller, Miller and Yeager, which designed some of the later buildings on the campus, but this is not verified. August Fromme was the contractor.
Only six years earlier, the Indiana General Assembly had enacted a law authorizing the state to oversee better care and control of “orphan, dependent, neglected, and abandoned children.” It prohibited keeping those from ages three to seventeen in poorhouses for longer than ten days duration, as had been standard practice in many counties. (The duration allowed was increased to sixty days in 1901.) The same act established a state agency for placing children, which would be under the jurisdiction of the State Board of Charities.
Vigo County already had the well endowed Rose Orphans Home in Terre Haute, opened in 1884 with a legacy from the estate of railroad magnate Chauncy Rose. As its name implied, it was for true orphans only. (Demolished many years ago, it also was located on the National Road on the east side of Terre Haute. See PHOTOS) Circuit Court Judge David N. Taylor appointed the first Board of Children’s Guardians presided over by Sydney B. Davis; they oversaw a system in which matrons were chosen to care for in their homes – usually farms – groups of neglected children, or sometimes individual children were placed in foster homes. The board immediately began efforts to have the county purchase a farm on which suitable buildings might be erected to care for all the dependent children in one place. In 1901, the county bought the sixty-acre Klatte farm on the north side of the National Road where it crossed by the Vandalia Railroad, about five miles east of Terre Haute near the small town of Glenn. In the summer of 1903, the first children began to arrive at the Vigo County Home for Dependent Children, which shortly afterward became known as the Glenn Home, for its location. Its first director was Ovid Lawrence, who remained until just before his death in 1917. Ovid’s wife served as the principal matron; they lived in quarters in the main building, as did members of the staff. The children lived in three virtually identical two-story buildings, each containing dormitories and a day room, and each under the charge of a matron. During their stay at the Home, the children attended school for half a day and “kept busy at some occupation the other half.” The boys worked the farm; the girls learned housekeeping skills. A sizable garden provided food for the table and helped keep down expenses of running the institution.
The Glenn Home, by most accounts, was a model institution for its day. After an inspection in 1915, the State Board of Charities and Correction reported that “the work of this institution is to be commended throughout, and the county may well be proud of its work and managements, there being nothing of this class superior to it in the state.” Progressive Era ideals were in full bloom at the Glenn Home, touted in terms that may appear to us today as smug and self-congratulatory. The Home was seen by community leaders as “a Godsend to the unfortunate…a haven of refuge to these children.” Indeed, their lives were no doubt stabilized in the Home; they were well fed and proved with clean beds and regular health care. In what was considered a particularly progressive move, the children were not required to wear uniforms, but were individually clothed, largely in garments of the girls own making. Accommodations were modest but certainly made attractive with touches such as starched white curtains and bed of bright flowers lining the drive. The girls’ being taught to sew, cook, and do housework, and the boys’ instruction in farming and woodcraft clearly aided in the Home’s successful efforts to be party self-supporting. The children were taught “morals” as well, and “affection [was] implied through every act by the office of the institution.” The image portrayed was that the institution staff made every effort to create a home-like atmosphere such as many of these children had never enjoyed. The total number of children at Glenn Home at any time within a few years of its opening reached and continued to hover at little over one hundred.
The Glenn Home functioned successfully through several decades, continuing to balance school, vocational training, moral guidance, and some semblance of a home atmosphere. Improvements to the facility took place even during the Depression, with some of the work accomplished through WPA projects. After World War II the three original dormitories were replaced with modern buildings, coinciding with the 1949 closing of the Rose Orphans Home in Terre Haute, whose children were then placed in the Glenn Home. By the 1960’s, however, the Home’s population was decreasing, owing largely to the increase in the number of licensed foster homes. Large institutions like the Glenn Home were losing favor, and orphanages all over the state—and nation—were closing.
In 1973, Circuit Judge Joseph Anderson announced plans to close the Glenn Home because renovation was impractical, even though earlier that year the county commissioners had voted to fund not only neglected maintenance but even additional improvements. The judge also pointed out that the cost of maintaining a child at the Home cost twice as much as in foster care, and that, in any case, “the best vehicle for rearing children these days is the family-type atmosphere proved by the foster home.” Plans fell through, however, largely because foster home placements for teens were particularly difficult. Federal Title XX monies became available for the Glenn Home in 1978, which, since they reduced the amount of county funds needed, allowed the Home to remain open for about a year and a half longer. In 1979 the county purchased three group homes around Terre Haute to house dependent teens, and the Glenn Home for Dependent Children was closed. The property was sold at auction in early 1980 to a local couple.
During the 1980’s the buildings were partially converted into apartments but later the project was abandoned. Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity of nearby Rose Hulman Institute purchased the buildings for use as a chapter house and housing for the students of the fraternity. The buildings are gradually being rehabilitated. The Vigo County Home for Dependent Children was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the year 2000.
Click the links below to view the respective eras of Home History
