Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/641

 Mr. A. L. Keenan has served as treasurer of the institution ever since its incorporation, and Mr. F. S. Aikin has rendered service to the home as secretary for nineteen years.

The institution is now caring for fifty-one babies; and thirty-seven babies were placed in permanent homes during the year 1909. And altogether, more than 1,000 babies have been taken care of since the home was opened.

The institution has no endowment, whatever. The building site was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Kern as stated; and the building erected by funds given by benevolent and public spirited citizens. The lady managers have appropriated all the rights, easements and benefits of "Tag-Day" in each year as the special and particular franchise of the baby home; and on the day for 1910 the young ladies sold "tags" to the amount of $6,420.

Mrs. D. C. Burns is now the president of the institution, and has made a great success of her management. And she presents the following history of the institution, and its claims on the sympathy and support of good people.

The experience of this home is that it is more expensive to care for a baby than a grown up child. One nurse is required for every five babies. And a matron must take charge of the whole institution, with the assistance of a housekeeper, a cook, laundryman, and night and day nurses in proportion to the number of children. No officer of the home receives any pay for services, and the physicians give their services free, frequently visiting the home every day in the month.

Through the Baby Home in the decade and a half of its existence, several hundred infants have passed from the early weeks or months of human helplessness on through sheltered babyhood and happy early childhood into homes secured for them by officers of the institution.

The work is a beneficent one. Orphaned, or worse than orphaned babies represent human Hfe in its most helpless and pitiful aspect. There have been under the shelter of the Baby Home, since it was first opened, in narrow, unsuitable, inconvenient quarters, infants whose mothers died at their birth and whose fathers, with the helplessness of poor men thus situated, turned to that institution as a veritable house of refuge for their motherless babes; infants whose mothers had been cruelly deserted by the fathers of their babes, and who welcomed the Baby Home as a place in which they could leave their helpless ones while they went out to work; infants whose legal right to be in the world was not questioned, but both of whose parents had passed from earth; infants worse than orphaned, whose parents had "jarred apart" and left them without their birthright of home and love; and, now and then, alas, an infant has been left upon the doorstep of the Baby Home, its abandonment thus suggesting the shadow of shame that darkened its entrance into life. Of these classes of homeless infants, those of cruelly deserted mothers have been perhaps the most frequent inmates of the Baby Home; next in number comes those, one or both of whose parents have died. The last class above enumerated has been the smallest one passed through the institution to the care of foster parents.

In addition to the Baby Home supported by everybody, the Catholic Sisters of Mercy have established a home at Park Place near Oregon City, for foundlings, orphans, and very young children. The average number of children taken care of here is about 65, fully equal to the Baby Home, and many of these find permanent homes in Catholic families, and are thus provided for during their minority or for life. Every comfort and protecting care is here furnished these helpless children.

The Sisters of Mercy are engaged in a great variety of work in this arch-diocese.