Perhaps its name was chosen in the botanical sense:
a planting bed where young stock grows tall and strong through proper pruning
and nurturing. Twin columns of mature shade trees along the property’s southern
edge, as shown in a contemporary print, did indeed look like surviving
specimens of a tree nursery.
Whatever the origin of its name, The Nursery was
part of an assortment of asylums, orphanages and hospitals under the umbrella
of the New York City Almshouse.
Sometimes called the Juvenile Department of the
Almshouse, the facility was conceived as a pioneering effort to separate younger
inmates from the bad influence of their elders. It was established on
Blackwell’s Island in 1832, but soon moved across the river to the village of
Ravenswood in Queens County.
A contemporary lithograph presents a seagull’s view of how
The Nursery on Randall’s Island, in the East River off Upper Manhattan, looked
in its new setting when the six youngest Wortman boys landed there in the
summer of 1852. Its declared mission was
to serve as official home for the city’s legions of destitute children, who
would be “instructed in the elements of a good common school education and
trained to habits of temperance and industry.”
In 1848 The Nursery was relocated on a rolling and
wooded site on Randall’s Island overlooking both the East River and Harlem
River. Six years later the state-funded
but privately run House of Refuge, which boasted of being “the greatest reform
school in the world,” became a neighbor on the south end of the island. Both were under the oversight of the
Almshouse Board of Governors, but not connected otherwise.
When
young John Henry was sent to the House of Refuge it was situated in Manhattan
along the East River. His case,
recorded neatly in a bound journal, must have been one of the tamest of any boy
ever admitted. The complete entry
describing his arrest on 2 June 1852 reads as follows:
“He
states he has always lived with his parents and attended school. About one year ago he left school and went to
work at segar making and other work. Lately he became tired of work and wandered about, sleeping in
haylofts and outhouses. For this he was
taken up by the police and sent here for vagrancy. Says he never stole. He
seems a well-disposed boy.”
John Henry apparently took his days at the
reformatory in stride, if the final entry in his case history is an accurate reflection.
Under the date of 26 April 1859 (six
years after he was sent to the New Jersey farm), a supervisor wrote, “John
visited us and stayed all night. He
looks well and says he is now with his master who is paying him wages. Judging
from his appearance we think he will do well.”
The journal offers no hint as to whether John Henry
stopped at the nearby Nursery to visit brothers Frank and Seth, who were
awaiting their big adventure on the westbound Orphan Train. (Joseph was already working in Flatbush,
which is now part of Brooklyn, as an apprentice furnace maker. And William, who had died the previous
September, most likely lay in a potter’s field grave on nearby Ward’s Island.)
Some Nursery charges were true orphans. Most, however, simply had been dumped there
as paupers. Many were plucked from city
streets where in 1850 an estimated 30,000 waifs wandered about homeless, doing
all sorts of frightful mischief and mayhem to themselves and others. Police called them “Arabs” or “street rats.”
We’d be hard-pressed, and probably foolish, to
praise institutions as discredited and maligned as orphanages. They probably deserved much of the
condemnation heaped upon them by Dickens and others. Compared to the wretched homes the children had fled or been
booted out of, however, Randall’s Island may have seemed almost heavenly. Sort of a stern summer camp where only spoons
were allowed at the dining room table. (Knives and forks advisedly were kept under lock and key.)
Young Andrew Burke, at least, harbored fond memories
of the place. Burke, who at the age of
9 rode into Noblesville aboard the same Orphan Train as Frank and Seth, was an
oft-cited success story for the Children’s Aid Society after rising in North
Dakota politics to become the state’s second governor.
Writing to the Society in later years, Burke said
he’d revisited Randall’s Island in 1887 and "was much saddened” by its
dilapidated and deserted appearance. It
was by then reduced to a virtual foundling home and hospital for babies and
young infants.
In my time -- as a ward of the institution --
everything was kept in order and adornation. The moral, physical, and intellectual training of the boys was
incomparable, almost. Well do I
remember the school, the gymnasium, the playgrounds, the bathing houses, the
umbrageous grove, and the boulders upon which I often sat and looked out upon
the [Long Island] Sound, watching the myriad of craft upon its silvery bosom
and speculating upon the future and the destiny it had in store for me.
One fine spring day in 1856 The New York Times sent
a reporter to all three of the city’s welfare islands -- Randall’s, Ward’s and
Blackwell’s – on a ramble to find out if they were worth visiting. He too liked The Nursery, particularly its
herd of “stray sheep” boys and the “Father Abraham” (Supt. Rufus Ripley) who
watched over them.
“On Randall’s Island the boys are brisk, military,
clean, musical, industrious and, at the time we saw them, hungry,” his story
began. He’d arrived when the boys “were
just standing” – for that’s how they ate – to a simple mid-day repast of beef
soup, bread, and vegetables fresh from their own garden.
“These children are tended as carefully as many a
private family’s. In the place set
apart for babies in arms, in the hospital, in the school-room, and about the
premises generally there was the usual good order and cleanliness.”
The Nursery, which at the time took children from
infancy to age 16 and kept them until they were 17, was brand new when Burke
and the Wortman boys were sent there. Ground had been broken for the cluster of
12 masonry buildings only four years earlier, and by the summer of 1852 it was
still a work in progress.
The buildings were plain and utilitarian, to be
sure, but within their shelter the orphans and rescued street urchins enjoyed –
most of them for the first time ever – decent meals served at regular intervals
and real beds in clean dormitory rooms. Other treats included snappy uniforms replete with straw hats and
bonnets, medical care from a full-time staff of doctors and nurses, fresh
water, sanitary toilets and frequent baths. The girls even wore shoes and stockings, and everyone got hot
chocolate at breakfast.
Teachers drawn from regular public schools taught
the children. Classes began at 9 in the
morning, broke for lunch, and ended at 3:30 in the afternoon. Older boys also received a little instruction
in gardening, farming, and various trades.
One of the most popular activities for boys was a
program of military drill in which the barefooted lads, shouldering wooden
rifles and accompanied by fife and drum, marched about like little soldiers. They showed off regularly for groups of
visiting dignitaries and occasionally were rewarded with field trips into
Manhattan to participate in holiday parades and other wondrous stuff.
On one such venture, more than 90 lads were ferried
off the island, given a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and strutted in front of
The New York Times. Then they tramped
off to City Hall Park, where Mayor Fernando Wood himself welcomed them. Lastly they filed across the street to posh
Astor House on Broadway to join some very rich and influential folks for lunch.
In a long article the following day, The New York
Times praised “the good little boys of Randall’s Island who, by dint of good
behavior … [were] selected occasionally to exemplify Young America to the
admiring citizens of New York.”
This rambunctious and noteworthy outing took place
in late May 1855. William, Frank,
Joseph and Seth Wortman were still at The Nursery at the time, and it’s nice to
think all four were chosen to march proudly along the avenues of Lower
Manhattan with what the boys proudly called the “Randall’s Island
Infantry.”
Twelve years later, by which time William had died
and his brothers were scattered, W.
H. Davenport, a journalist and pen-and-ink sketch artist, visited The Nursery
for a magazine article. His 16-page
illustrated piece appeared in the December 1867 issue of Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine. About the kids themselves, he
wrote:
It was difficult to realize that the antecedents of
many of these children were as bad as I knew them to be. Their intelligent faces and innocent
expressions combined with their behavior to turn one from thoughts of the
parentage and associations from which they had come. …
Not a few were from the ranks of the little
ragamuffins who infest the city
streets, sleeping wherever they can best find shelter and avoid the
police – under sheds, in doorways and alleys; and maintaining a precarious
existence by begging a few coppers here and there, or stealing what their sharpened
wits tell them incurs little risk of detection.
It would be interesting to know what the Wortman
boys thought of the place. Or their
parents, for that matter.
We can only wonder.