For sixty-one years, an imposing, three-story building on Tobey Street operated by the Providence Children's Friend Society provided shelter and refuge to the children of Providence. Hundreds of children without hope – orphaned, neglected, abandoned – entered through the doors. Within the safety of the brick walls, they dreamed of second chances, aspirations, and life with new foster families.
Constructed in 1863, the Tobey Street Home had been a model of modern construction. Now, in 1926, the building was a creaking relic of a bygone age. The worn stairs sagged from generations of pounding feet. The basement boiler gurgled and leaked, fitfully heating the drafty building. Finally, the doors of the Tobey Street Home closed for the last time.
The Providence Children’s Friend Society did not end with the closure of the Tobey Street Home in 1926 – today it remains the oldest social service organization in the state that addresses the needs of neglected, orphaned, or abandoned children. Founded in 1834 by Harriet Ware, a young, idealistic schoolteacher in Providence’s India Point neighborhood, the institution has continually reinvented itself over the decades.
Initially, Harriet Ware offered assistance and makeshift accommodations to children in need, soliciting donations from churches and community institutions all across Providence. Upon the official incorporation of the Providence Children’s Friend Society, the founders expressed their principles regarding the care of dependent children:
The design of the institution embraces all children who are in condition of orphanage and that this is the only institution in the State, where any provision is made for their support and education. More comprehensive, however, in operation than a restricted orphan asylum, it is intended, also, to extend its blessings to those who are equally destitute, and perhaps more afflicted, than the bereaved and fatherless.
Most importantly, the society welcomed all children in need, whether they were officially considered “orphans” or not, and dedicated itself to providing the children in its care with an education. With the support of many prominent citizens of Providence, a small orphanage was opened, where children might stay for a time before being placed out with a foster family.
The orphanage moved several times, necessitated by the growing number of children in the society’s care, until the spacious Tobey Street Home was constructed during the Civil War. By the 1920s, however, the expense of running the orphanage and the changing nature and philosophy of child welfare convinced the institution’s directors to reconsider their approach.
Children’s Friend Society began to focus on other work, including general casework, adoption, and foster care placement and supervision. In 1949, the society merged with the Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Now known as Children’s Friend and Service of Rhode Island, the merged organization honors its long history by operating offices in both Providence and Central Falls and by continuing to provide assistance and advice to families with children in need.
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]]>In nineteenth-century America, there were few laws and regulations regarding child welfare. Destitute parents neglected and abandoned their responsibilities. Unscrupulous guardians profited from child labor with little concern for their charges' well-being. Short-tempered or intemperate adults took out their anxieties and anger on helpless children. By the late 1800s, it was clear that an organization was needed to safeguard children’s interests, and in 1882, the Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RISPCC) received a charter from the state legislature.
From its beginning, RISPCC was an early advocate of what we now call child welfare. It was a private organization that was quasi-governmental, with considerable powers to arrest and prosecute offenders. Over the course of its eighty years, before it merged to become part of Children’s Friend and Service in 1949, it evolved from acting as a guardian for children abused by the influences and actions of vicious parents to advocating for more economic support for parents so they might create a stable and healthy family life.
RISPCC’s legislative charter gave it considerable power to execute its mission. Agents could investigate complaints against parents or guardians for “wrongful neglect,” for using a child for “wanton, cruel or improper purposes,” for inducing a child to beg or steal, or for “gross and habitual cruelty.” RISPCC could enter homes and remove children, appear in court on behalf of children, and place children under indenture. The court could also award custody of state wards to RISPCC with the understanding that the organization would oversee the child’s transfer to either the Rhode Island State Home and School or a private orphanage.
As society’s attitudes toward child protection changed, so too did the philosophy of the RISPCC. Over time, RISPCC expanded its concerns to include child labor, curfew violations, truancy, child abuse, neglect, starvation, abandonment, sexual molestation, unwed mothers, incest, alcohol abuse and juvenile delinquency. Its respensibilities grew as well: service provider, policy developer, children’s advocate, social reformer, and – most importantly – significant spokesperson for child welfare.
In RISPCC’s early years, the few children actually removed from their homes were boarded with a matron on Sabin Street in Providence. By its third annual meeting, in 1885, it was voted to establish a temporary home for children. Donations allowed for the purchase of a shelter facility, which was located on the corner of Doyle Avenue and Camp Street. It operated there until 1953.
In 1946, RISPCC changed its name to Rhode Island Child Service, in hopes that the new name “might really give a picture of our work.” In 1949, recognizing that duplication of services by private agencies was ineffective, it merged with Children’s Friend Society to become Children’s Friend and Service. It was not until 1962, however, that the state of Rhode Island finally took responsibility for the investigation of child abuse and neglect complaints that RISPCC had overseen, making it one of the last states in the nation to do so.
]]>All across America people ridiculed and smashed Henry D. Cogswell’s fountains, but this one survives in downtown Pawtucket.
Cogswell – a dentist, millionaire, and crusader in the temperance movement against alcohol – had not always been a wealthy man. Born in Connecticut in 1820, young Cogswell sunk into poverty after his parents died. As a teenager he walked fifty miles to Pawtucket to start work in the mills. He managed to become a dentist, and in 1847 he set up a local practice. Lured to California by the Gold Rush, he made a fortune in real estate.
The newly-minted millionaire assumed an ancestral coat of arms and began to call himself a “capitalist,” but he never forgot his penniless past. He determined to uplift the working class through charitable deeds.
As Cogswell saw it, drunkenness led to pauperism. If poor people had an alternative to alcohol – like clean, cold water to drink – they might renounce liquor. And so, starting in 1878, Cogswell arranged to send free drinking fountains to towns throughout the United States.
Cogswell’s actions might have been well-intentioned, but he made some regrettable design choices. His fountains often came topped with a statue that resembled Cogswell himself. This figure, which he referred to as the “Guardian of the Fountain,” held a scroll in one hand and a glass of water in the other. Engravings at the base commanded passersby to work hard and avoid dissipation.
The fountains proved irresistible targets for vandals. Drunken revelers, rowdy art lovers, and citizens who deemed the statues to be in poor taste all moved to destroy them. Wherever he appeared, the “Guardian” suffered attacks, including topplings with a lasso, lake immersions, and a kidnapping.
When Mark Twain spotted a Cogswell fountain in Rochester, New York, he remarked, “It has a putrid, decomposed sort of a look that is offensive for a delicate organism.” Others agreed. In 1885 an unidentified party dispatched the Rochester statue by bashing it to bits with crowbars.
The Pawtucket fountain escaped the mobs, perhaps because it came decorated with a heron rather than Cogswell himself. Residents welcomed it with speeches and song when it arrived in 1880. The fountain provided water, “God’s Free Gift to Man and Beast,” from high spouts for humans and lower spouts for horses, dogs, and any other animals in need of refreshment. On the foreheads of the cat-like gargoyles, one can still see marks made by rings where drinking cups once hung.
When the fountain became inconvenient downtown, the city transferred it to Oak Grove Cemetery. But mourners deemed it too cheerful for that spot, even after they had the word “Welcome” removed from the bottom of the base. The fountain moved to Slater Park in 1904 before the city finally restored it to its original location in 1990. At that time, a time capsule found embedded at the top of the column yielded soggy papers and an Indian Head penny.
Today Pawtucket’s Cogswell fountain is one of few still in existence. It stands defunct, a monument to a man who excelled at making money but botched giving it away.
]]>Within the granite and brownstone walls of Providence’s imposing Gothic courthouse, Manuel shifts nervously from foot to foot. For the second time this year, Manuel stands alone before a judge, awaiting his sentencing. The son of Portuguese immigrants, Manuel’s struggling family has no money to spend on an attorney; the right to free legal counsel is decades away. Earlier in 1925, Manuel had been arrested for violating property rights and committing theft. This time, he was picked up by the Providence Police Department because of truancy. After reviewing Manuel’s record and listening to the testimony of the arresting officer, the judge is finally ready to announce his sentencing – “Six weeks at Sockanosset.” As the judge slams down his gavel, a look of relief creeps across Manuel’s face.
From 1881 until 1985, the Sockanosset School for Boys served as a juvenile detention facility and reformatory. Rhode Island citizens had first determined the need for such a facility as early as 1847, when the Providence City Council approved the establishment of a school for the “confinement, instruction and reformation of juvenile offenders and young persons of idle, vicious or vagrant habits.” For three decades, children of both sexes were sent to the Providence Reform School in Tockwotton House in the city’s Fox Point neighborhood. By 1880, however, concerns over the school’s management and new approaches to “reforming” juvenile delinquents led to the creation of two new institutions: the Oaklawn School for Girls and the Sockanosset School for Boys.
In 1881, construction of the new boys’ school began on the Howard Reservation in Cranston – a site that already included the State Asylum for the Incurable Insane, the State Prison and Providence County Jail, and the state-run almshouse. Five stone cottages were built between 1881 and 1895, each with its own schoolroom and a dormitory intended to house up to fifty boys. The school complex also included a house for the Sockanosset Superintendent, an infirmary, a gym, and an elegant stone chapel. By locating the reformatory on pastoral land away from corrupting urban influences, the founders were following the prevailing doctrine of the nineteenth century: urban chaos and idleness engendered lawlessness. With that belief foremost in their minds, the school’s administrators kept the boys busy on the Howard Reservation’s 225 acres of farmland.
The early years of Sockanosset were highly regimented. The boys spent hours doing physically demanding activities like farm chores, building repair and construction, and coal shoveling. However, forward-thinking school administrators began to shift towards a program of education and rehabilitation. Social reformers insisted that the crimes of juveniles were typically motivated by social circumstance. Roy L. McLaughlin, the Superintendent of Sockanosset during the 1920s, noted that “most of the boys come from ‘broken’ or ‘badly bent’ homes.”
Sockanosset slowly shifted from a reformatory designed to contain and discipline the unruly to a school where classes and vocational training focused on preparing boys for life after Sockanosset. A key part of this training were the vocational classes offered by accomplished craftsmen. At one point, Sockanosset boasted a blacksmith shop, a carpenter shop, a farm school where they raised much of the food they ate, and a printing shop where they printed The Howard Times. Items created by boys at the school were the showpiece of the Rhode Island exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During its height in the early twentieth century, Sockanosset was known as a respected vocational school. Some boys may have been truant or committed minor offenses in hopes of being sentenced to Sockanosset. As in Manuel's situation, boys being sent to Sockanosset knew they would receive regular meals and practical vocational training.
As the century progressed, however, a lack of funds and overcrowding at the school necessitated the termination of the very programs that had made Sockanosett so forward-thinking for its time. After over one hundred years of operation, the school finally closed in 1985.
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