They were known as plain people with a
practical faith. Their church was called German Baptist and later
changed to Church of the Brethren when ethnic identity became a
handicap, but they were nicknamed Dunkards for their method of
baptism: not once but three times under. Following the injunction
in the Book of James “to care for orphans and widows in their
distress,” in 1903 they voted to establish an Old Folks and
Orphans Home in Girard, Ill. The next year they paid C.C. Gibson
$3,000 for 20 acres of farm ground at the northwest edge of town.
By 1905 they had raised $15,000 of the $20,000 they would need, and
in the spring construction began on a large brick building to house
the “Home for the Homeless.” Soon the name was changed
to “The Home.”
Last Sunday, church folk from miles around
came to Girard for an old-fashioned church service to commemorate
100 years of caring at The Home. In 1976, when the old brick
building was demolished and replaced by a modern nursing
home, it took the name Pleasant Hill Village, reflecting the
board’s dream to fill its 20 acres with homes and services for
the aging. The board struggled for several years just to fill the
nursing home, then struggled some more to keep it solvent. Only in the
last three years has the “village” begun to take shape,
with the construction of 48 new apartments for seniors. Old folks are
still thriving at this place everyone calls The Home.
But the orphans are gone. Caring for homeless
youngsters under the same roof as homeless oldsters worked well for
awhile, with the children bringing delight to the old folks, who
contributed their wisdom and life experience. A woman who took care
of the children in the early 1920s recalled this incident many
years later: “One evening I was hearing the girls’
prayers. There were two sisters, Hazel, the youngest, and her older
sister, Edna. Hazel was saying her prayers and Edna was tickling
her feet. Hazel said, ‘Wait a minute, Lord, while I knock the
devil out of Edna.’”
She also recalled a tragedy, when one of the
boys, against the rules, decided to go swimming in a pond on his
way to school. He suffered cramps and drowned. Not long after that the county
turned over the care of its wards to the state, and the children were
sent to an orphanage in Bloomington. “It took the heart out of us
all,” the caretaker wrote. “It was family breakup for all
once again. The Home was never the same.”
But life went on, with generosity and humor
fueling the enterprise when other resources were scarce. For
Christmas 1923, the Girard community gave The Home a player piano,
with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan contributing 27 $1 bills to
the gift. Along about that time the superintendent took The
Home’s pair of horses to a place from which they would be
sold to raise money. After a sad farewell he went back to his
office. Not long after, here came one of the horses, broken out of
his stall, trotting down the road back home.
Helen Talkington, the nursing home’s
assistant director of nursing, is retiring this year after nearly
30 years of caring for residents. When she started there in the
1970s, the rules weren’t so strict. She remembers a little
man, Howard Ball, who used to go to town and the grocery store with
the staff member who made the daily mail run. No one checked his
bag when he returned. One night he became very ill, and Helen had
to send him to the hospital. “He admitted
before going that he had eaten ham and onions. He said, ‘I had it
outside my window to keep it cold.’ However, the temperature had
gotten warm and the ham had turned ‘green,’ causing him a
good case of food poisoning.” He recovered, only to return to his
old tricks. “One night my aides came to me, asking me to check a
toilet which wouldn’t flush. I took off the top of the flush box
to find a neatly tied plastic bag containing a chunk of bologna and an
onion. He had found a different place to keep his snack
cold.”
The chronicle of a nursing home is history
written small, nothing on the grand scale of the war on terrorism
and evil. But pondering the amount of love that has been poured
into that place over 100 years makes me think it is somehow just as
important.
Fletcher Farrar is a board member at Pleasant Hill Village,
which will celebrate its centennial again July 29-31 with a weekend
of food and entertainment on the grounds in conjunction with Girard’s sesquicentennial festivities.
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2005.
