Library Marks 79th anniversary of junior home closing

As we make our way into winter, the staff at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library prepare to celebrate a unique institution from Tiffin's history, the Junior Home. December marks the 79th anniversary of the closing of the National Orphans' Home, Junior Order United American Mechanics, known as the "Junior Home." The Junior Home operated from 1897-1944 and the remnants of the campus are now part of the Tiffin Developmental Center. This home was open to the children of deceased members of the Junior Order United American Mechanics fraternal secret order and, in its 47-year history, housed and educated over 5,000 children. The Junior Home was unique among other orphanages at that time. Instead of housing the children in institutional dorms, cottage plan living was employed. An average of thirty children resided in each cottage, which looked and operated much like a normal household, with the children in charge of cooking their meals and housekeeping. The Junior Home also included a first-of-its-kind vocational program for all high school-aged students. Students were able to choose from a wide range of vocations from baking to woodworking to instrumental music. A special program within the vocational area was the School of Domestic Science, the only school of its kind in the United States, where 16–to 18-year-old girls learned how to be homemakers, including household budgeting, cooking, housekeeping, and sewing. Part of the vocational program also involved farming and agriculture where students worked 350 acres of farmland to grow crops to feed the residents of the Junior Home as well as the hundreds of farm animals on the property. The vocational program allowed the Junior Home to be almost entirely self-sustaining, causing it to operate at one-third of the cost of the state-run home in Xenia, Ohio. The library's display will showcase items pertaining to the Junior Home that are not currently available to patrons such as items crafted by Junior Home residents as part of the vocational program, a scrapbook donated by Homekid Ruth Lathrope Effland, and editions of the Junior Home newspaper "The Arm and Hammer." The Seneca County Ohio Museum will once again be collaborating with the library on this display, highlighting some of the many Junior Home items that are part of their collection. In addition, the display will incorporate items from a sizable donation made to the library in August by the family of Homekid Ila Rhea (Gore) Chirstoff. Ila, along with her younger siblings, James Gore and Sarah (Gore) Podemski, lived at the Junior Home in the 1930s. Ila worked in the nursing vocational program at the Junior Home hospital and her brother worked in the agricultural program. Ila graduated from the Junior Home in 1937. The donation includes over eighty items, such as editions of the Junior Home newspaper from the 1930s, booklets for the yearly Homekid Reunions held in Tiffin, a pin, and numerous photographs. While the items from the Ila Gore donation have not been digitized yet, the library hosts more than 750 items related to the Junior Home on the Seneca County Digital Library website, including over 580 photographs. You can access the Seneca County Digital Library by visiting www.tiffinsenecalibrary.org. For more information, please call 419-447-3751. Jennifer Aloisi is the Digitization Librarian at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library.