At Denver's Oldest Cemetery, Orphans at last Gain Recognition

Story by Zoë Frechette / Nov. 22, 2002

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Denver Orphans' Home, 1910 (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, X-28891)

Until last month, the northeastern corner of Denver's crowded Riverside Cemetery, just north of downtown, looked starkly empty. For more than 100 years, visitors to the city's oldest cemetery, established in 1876, never suspected that 22 children—residents of the Denver Orphans' Home—were buried in the quiet acre beside the train tracks. Unless that visitor was someone like Gertrude Kordziel, whose uncle was one of those children.

Colorado in the late 1800s, wracked by depression after the 1893 Silver Panic, brought desperate times for young families. Fathers lost their jobs and left in search of work. Sometimes, like Kordziel's grandfather, Frederick Deal, they never came back. Unable to feed or clothe her four young children, Kordziel's grandmother, Susan Deal, placed them in the Denver Orphans' Home, a decision that may have saved all of her children except 10-month-old James, who died of pneumonia on May 1, 1900.

Five years later, Susan Deal was able to retrieve her children from the Orphan Home, and eventually, Kordziel's aunt placed a footstone on James' grave. "It was important to my family that he be remembered in that way," Kordziel says.

James Deal was the only orphan to be recognized at the site until this October's memorial service for the orphans, the culmination of a year-long, grassroots effort led by cemetery manager Cliff Dougal. For years, Dougal found it difficult to lead tour groups past the lonely corner plot. Between 1890 and 1910, Dougal had learned from Riverside's handwritten records, the Denver Orphans' Home buried children in Riverside, unable to afford markers.

Last year, more than 3,000 people visited Riverside Cemetery's 77-acre historic lot for walking tours and ceremonies. "I would tell people the truth," Dougal says. "That there are 22 orphans buried here with no marker. It was a hard thing to say."

Lola Russell in Oct. 2002

When Colorado resident Lola Russell learned about the forgotten orphans during a walking tour last year, she broke down in tears. "It wasn't right," she says, "that everyone else had a marker, and these little children didn't." Russell, a member of the Northglenn Senior Center in Northglenn, Colo., encouraged her group to donate $50 toward the cost of a headstone. Inspired, Dougal began raising funds last November, gathering more than $2,500 for a granite monument engraved with a picture of the 1883 Denver Orphans' Home on one side and 22 names on the other.

For 75 years, "orphan trains," the concept of Connecticut minister Charles Loring Brace, relocated abandoned children from urban areas to rural communities in the West. Between 1854 and 1910, Brace's Children's Aid Society of New York sent about 100,000 abandoned, homeless, and orphaned street children from New York City to the Midwest on orphan trains, according to its 1910 annual report. More than 1,500 arrived in Colorado, and many ended up in the Denver Orphans' Home.

Founded in 1876 by the Denver Ladies' Relief Society, the Denver Orphans' Home represents the city's earliest efforts to provide care for neglected children. Denver businessman J.H. Wyman donated property for the Orphans' Home, and it was built in 1883. That orphanage quickly became overcrowded and a new facility was built nearby in 1901. The two-and-a-half story, red-brick, Renaissance revival building designed by Denver architects Willis Marean and Albert Norton is still used for programs that reach 500 children each year.

Now the Denver Children's Home, the 101-year-old building became a residential treatment center in 1962, when the state social service system eliminated orphanages. The organization—the oldest nonprofit in Colorado—treats traumatized, abused, and mentally ill children.

Gravestone in Riverside Cemetery (Courtesy Fairmount Cemetery)

On Oct. 22, 2002, 100 people, including Gertrude Kordziel, attended a service for the Denver orphans. After the memorial headstone was presented, several orphan-train folksongs were performed. At the end of the ceremony, organizers released 23 doves, one in honor of each orphan buried at Riverside, and one for all forgotten orphans. For one sunny fall afternoon, a community honored the lives of its poorest children, lost long ago.

"If we don't mark our past," Dougal said later, "we're lost. Not marking the graves of these children means not recognizing that they once lived. We can't afford to not learn from their short lives."

After the ceremony, Kordziel said that her grandmother "always believed that if she could have taken care of my uncle herself then she would have nursed him back to health. But the times were too hard. I often wonder what kind of man he would have grown into, and whose lives he would have touched."

Zoë Frechette works at the Adoption Exchange, an organization that finds adoptive homes for foster children. She lives in Denver.

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