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View ProfilesJune 14, 2023 PAID POST » City
Published June 14, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
The waterfront property that's home to Burlington's growing Cambrian Rise neighborhood is a lovely spot, with stunning views of sunsets over Lake Champlain.
If you visited it today, you might never know about the site's tragic past: From 1854 until 1974, it was home to St. Joseph's Orphanage, which housed 13,000 children during that time. Countless former residents have come forward since to describe physical and sexual abuse they endured at the hands of the nuns and other staff who ran the facility.
Brenda DePalma Hannon is one of them: She was just 6 years old when she was brought to the orphanage in 1959; she didn't leave until 1968.
"You were dropped off there and forgotten," she said in a recent interview. "It was like you were just thrown away."
Hannon is now part of a group of former residents and volunteers working to ensure that the community remembers what happened at St. Joseph's — and keeps it from ever happening again. This summer, they're launching a fundraising campaign to build a permanent memorial pathway and healing garden in the area below the former orphanage.
It will offer residents and community members a chance to acknowledge what happened there while also reclaiming the space, preserving it for children and families of the future.
The story of what happened at St. Joseph's has trickled out over the past three decades. Former residents began coming forward in the 1990s, when a number of them sued the organizations that ran the orphanage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington and the Sisters of Providence.
The former residents faced intense public scrutiny and resistance from the church. Eventually, nuns and priests admitted some wrongdoing, and the church settled some of the suits. Over time, the issue disappeared from local headlines.
Abuse scandals were making news elsewhere, though. In 2002, the Boston Globe's Spotlight team documented how priests abused hundreds of children in the Boston archdiocese; in 2015, the story of that investigation was made into the Oscar-winning film Spotlight. The film concludes with a lengthy list of cities around the world where other abuse scandals have been uncovered — including Burlington, Vt.
The details about St. Joseph's might have disappeared from public view entirely if it hadn't been for Australian writer Christine Kenneally. She became interested in the untold stories of child abuse in orphanages a decade ago. "I spoke to Native Americans in Washington State in Montana; I spoke to French Canadian people up and down the East Coast and others as well," she said in a recent Zoom interview. "I ended up focusing on St. Joseph because of the 1990s litigation, primarily."
Those lawsuits — and articles written about them at the time — created a written record she could follow. "That litigation, in the end, was incredibly devastating for a lot of people, for numerous reasons," she said. "But because they were so brave, because they told their story, because they ran that gauntlet after the incredible trauma of being in the orphanage, they created this immense record."
Kenneally went through it and reinterviewed former residents for a 2018 piece published by BuzzFeed News titled "We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St. Joseph's Catholic Orphanage."
The article sent shock waves through Vermont and prompted then-attorney general T.J. Donovan to launch an investigation. The St. Joseph's Orphanage Task Force included the AG's office, the Vermont State Police, the Chittenden County State's Attorney, the Burlington mayor's office and the Burlington Police Department.
When Hannon heard about the probe, she called the Burlington Police Department and sat down with officers to tell them what she experienced at the orphanage; she was one of more than 50 former residents who came forward to offer testimony.
"It was the very first time I spoke about it to anyone," she said of her two-hour interview. "My husband didn't even know about it."
Hannon had watched what happened to the former residents who came forward in the 1990s, the way they had been treated by the church. "They were all revictimized by the Catholic Diocese again," she said. "I thought, I'm not putting myself through that."
What changed for her?
With the new investigation, "It finally registered for me: People are believing us," Hannon said. "It was coming out; we were being believed. We were not looked at as liars or making things up."
The final, 150-page report assembled by the state task force includes Hannon's testimony. The task force concluded that it could not bring any criminal charges — the statute of limitations had expired for both sexual and physical abuse, and it could not find evidence of murder. However, the report states unequivocally: "It is clear that trauma occurred."
Its summary details repeated reports of abuse and neglect. "One of the most common allegations, reported by a large majority of the survivors interviewed, was physical abuse in the form of beatings," it revealed. "Survivors described a variety of situations in which the nuns would beat the children, including but not limited to children wetting the bed, not making the bed correctly, speaking out of turn or rudely, trying to console another child, trying to recoil from being hit, speaking to or seeking out siblings residing in a different part of the Orphanage, refusing to eat, getting out of bed during the night, looking out the window, moving during a lineup for prospective parents, soiling their pants, or trying to write left-handed."
Many of these accusations were also present in the court documents in the 1990s.
Kenneally remembers finding some of them early on in her research. "There are these shocking moments that I still sort of think about a lot. When Sally Dale saw a boy thrown from a fourth story window, that was very powerful to first read about that. The description of a man called Joseph Eskra, who talked about coming across a boy tied to a tree who was frozen, a boy who had been missing from the dinner table."
In fact, the stories were so powerful that she wrote a book about them — Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice, published in March. It centers on St. Joseph's, but Kenneally broadened it to include research she's done on similar scandals in other parts of the U.S. and abroad.
"It's the same everywhere," she said. "It's extraordinary, the ways in which some of the stories are exactly the same. Kids having wet sheets draped around them in the mornings after they wet the bed, being humiliated by the nuns and the other kids ... Kids were pushed down the stairs all over the world, and some of them didn't get up again."
Though the state's 2018 investigation didn't result in a path for justice in the courts, it did create the St. Joseph's Orphanage Restorative Inquiry, led by the Burlington Community Justice Center.
The inquiry brought members of the last surviving generation of former orphanage residents together — they formed a group called Voices of St. Joseph's Orphanage. Through their restorative process, members have recorded oral histories that have been preserved through the Vermont Folklife Center. Their testimonies and images have also traveled the state as part of an exhibit that's been on display at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier and at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. The Voices group pushed for policy changes, too. Its members lobbied the Vermont Legislature to eliminate the three-year statute of limitations for civil actions based on childhood physical abuse. As a result, in 2021, Vermont became one of a handful of states to make that change.
Working in collaboration with Burlington Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, the group has also designed the public memorial and healing garden. It's part of the process by which the community makes amends for allowing abuse to happen, unchallenged, for years. The project would connect North Avenue and the Burlington Greenway — the bike path along the waterfront — and would wind through Kieslich Park along the waterfront edge of Cambrian Rise.
The design for the path includes a sculptural arbor woven of natural elements, stone benches with a sight line to the orphanage building, wildflower plantings in flowing serpentine shapes and glacial boulders etched with the words of former residents.
The price tag: $160,000. The City of Burlington and the State of Vermont will both contribute funds, alongside donors from the community. The Pomerleau Family Foundation has kicked off the campaign with $25,000 to be used as a matching grant.
The fundraising campaign is overseen by Children of St. Joseph's Orphanage Development Committee, which includes representatives from the Vermont Folklife Center, the Burlington Community Justice Center, and Burlington Parks, Recreation & Waterfront, as well as former state legislator Marybeth Redmond and former lieutenant governor Molly Gray.
As assistant attorney general, Gray helped lead the state's 2018 investigation. "I feel a deep sense of personal responsibility to do everything that I can do to help make this memorial and healing space a reality," she said. "This feels like a small way to give back."
The contributions, to be made to the Parks Foundation of Burlington, are tax-deductible.
Hannon explained that the memorial is about more than just honoring the 13,000 children who went through the orphanage. "It also honors those children around the world who went through these situations," she said.
It will also, hopefully, serve as a reminder: "It will bring awareness to the public to always remember and protect the children and help them to grow strong and healthy," she said. "They are all of our legacies. And they're going to be all of our future."
Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the Parks Foundation of Burlington, a 501(c)(3) organization and fiscal sponsor of the project.
Donate online at stjosephsrjinquiry.com/memorialfund.
Writing a check? Please make it out to the Parks Foundation of Burlington and indicate "Children of St. Joseph's Orphanage Memorial" in the check memo line. Mail contributions to:
Parks Foundation of Burlington
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