Oddfellows and Orphan Trains

The family just got back from a big Spring Break road trip today, and we're all decompressing in our own ways.  There's nothing like two straight days in a car together to make people crave their own space That is, unless said people are three-year-old daughters who just can't seem to get enough interaction to even leave some of the other silence-seeking people alone long enough to take a shower...  As I reflect on my travels - wonderful, all of them - there is one moment that stands out in its poignancy, and it may yet become the subject of a final paper this term.

We spent several days in Liberty, MO with Kristin's aunt and uncle, and at one point they freed us to go off alone for a couple of hours.  We had seen a sign for a winery mere blocks away, so we went to explore further.  Driving onto the grounds, we were faced with several early 1900s era institutional red-brick buildings - all fairly large and, except for the building housing the winery, in various states of dereliction and disrepair.  Turns out this winery was on grounds formerly owned by the Oddfellows: an order (like the Masons) of men devoted to "visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan."  After tasting their wines (I'm not nearly sophisticated enough for this, but I can't help trying), the woman behind the bar showed us around the restored first floor of the building.  It had at one time been an orphanage, and during the Depression it was a work-house.  I couldn't help feeling a bit strange that a huge property that had at one time been devoted to caring for orphans, poor families, the sick, and the elderly (the other buildings on the property had been a hospital and a nursing home) was now being put to use growing grapes for wine and housing a wedding chapel and banquet hall.

I don't mean any undue critique on the owners here: their story is unique and wonderful in its own way, and I respect that they are painstakingly rebuilding at least one of these historic structures for people to share spirits and celebrate weddings.  Heck, there's even an ice-cream shop - I can't argue with that!  But coming on the heels of an article I read in Newsweek that recommended privatizing our national infrastructure to pay down the national debt, lots of charts and a discussion about the shifting financial dynamics in our country, and loads of contemplation from reading about Stuart Headlam, John Ruskin, and F.D. Maurice (a few of my favorite Christian socialists), I couldn't help but see this transition from workhouse to winery as an insidious bellwether of where our country's economic paradigm may lead.

The building where we cozied up to the antique walnut mirrored bar and tasted wine from the vineyards had once been home to scores of orphans.  Our guide explained that many of the children would have known their parents, but could not have been supported in their families of origin.  She went on to explain that due to its location, this house would have been a destination for the orphan trains that crossed the country in those years, and she showed the worn grooves that the children left in the stairs as the walked up and down holding the handrails.  We saw a room, half the size of our own bedroom, where three children would have lived ("and they were lucky if they had  bunk bed").  When the Depression hit, entire families would have gotten off those trains, feeling blessed to find a house with a room they could call their own - now those same tiny rooms would house up to six people.  The residents worked the kitchen and the land around the buildings, and in return were provided one meal a day and the luxury of a space with a door they could close.

There was even a cemetery on-site, and she pointed over the hill in the back as she described that, oddly, the vineyard closest to it was their best producer.  We bought our wine and headed out to explore the grounds.  The boundaries of the old farm fields were apparent as we toured the grounds: the box-housed grids of sub-divisions sprawled from the property lines in every direction.  The strange image of the parallel houses behind the parallel stones in the graveyard is still hard to shake, as was the odd feeling that this parcel which had once been devoted the livelihood of the entire community - even the survival of the country - was now an anachronistically preserved prime piece of real-estate in the middle of a growing metropolis: perfect for a family of means to start a winery. 

I'm still working out the implications contained in this brief snapshot of our vacation.  The slowly moldering devastation I saw in the old hospital and nursing home was a poetically disturbing vision of the fate of the altruistic enthusiasm that brought the Oddfellows Home into being, and the richly appointed restoration and repurposing of an orphanage and workhouse for an entirely different sort of peoples speaks volumes to me about the public resources and shared capital of our own day - who will benefit from the vision and toil and labor of today?