Adoptee grateful for maternity home -- 3/30/2008
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By DAVE CAREW/For the Lincoln Journal Star
Nebraska Industrial Home was really a state-operated home for young unwed women.
MILFORD - Mary Faye Archer was 19, single and pregnant. In 1943, that was still a crime in Nebraska, so the young Gretna woman was sent to the Nebraska Industrial Home near Milford.
The Industrial Home was, in truth, a maternity home established to shelter and protect pregnant, unwed girls and young women.
In 1889, when the home was built, the subject of maternity outside of marriage was considered too delicate to discuss. Hence, the home's name.
Though the home's residents were considered inmates, the new mothers and mothers-to-be were taught domestic skills and how to care for their children. School classes were offered for those who had not finished high school.
Young women often were referred there by judges on account of the women's home conditions.
Francis E. Willard, a women's rights leader affiliated with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, had pressured the Nebraska Legislature as early as 1874 to provide such a facility. The Legislature acted in 1887, creating the home for "homeless, penitent girls who have no specific disease," according to one undated rules pamphlet.
Jacob Culver, a brigadier general in the Nebraska National Guard, used his political clout to have the home built on a 40-acre site east of Milford. Blake and Company of Omaha got the $15,000 construction contract.
The first girl was admitted in 1889. Then, and for some time afterward, the institution was the only state-supported maternity home in the nation. The campus included two matching four-story dorms, a cattle barn, a boiler room, water tower, garden and laundry. A three-story brick hospital building was added in 1931.
According to a report covering the years 1902 through 1904, the average age of the women housed at the facility was 19; 15 babies were born during that period. Occupancy averaged 29, and annual costs averaged out to $109.21 per resident. Women were strongly encouraged - but not required - to give up their babies for adoption. Women sent to the home stayed for a full year.
Rules were strict. Women were awakened at 5 a.m. and had to be at their work stations by 6. Chapel services were conducted at 8 p.m. and lights were turned out at 9. All letters, coming or going, were read by the superintendent.
Women who broke the rules were sent to the top-floor rooms - the attic - of the dormitories and locked in solitary confinement. If they already had given birth, their babies were cared for by nurses while the women were confined.
***
Mary Faye Archer gave birth to a son, Dwaine, on Dec. 17, 1943, and gave him up for adoption Feb. 7, 1944.
Dwaine was moved to the Whitehall Children's Home in Lincoln and adopted in the spring of 1946 by a childless couple, Glenn and Emma Fosler, who farmed west of Seward.
"My folks told me that I had been adopted when I was about 7 years old," Fosler recalled recently. "I didn't know what to think for a while, but, as I grew up, I realized how fortunate I was. My birth mother would not have been able to care for me as my adoptive parents did."
He recalls that one time when he asked for a pony, his dad told him, "A horse eats twice as much as a steer and doesn't make you any money." Undaunted, Dwaine broke a steer to ride and named him Scout. Eventually he got a pony.
His love of horses continues. Today, he owns horses and rides often for pleasure and as a member of the Seward County Sheriff's Posse. In segments, he has ridden the entire 86-mile border of Seward County.
As he grew older, Fosler sought to learn the identity of his birth mother, doing so quietly so that he wouldn't concern his adoptive parents. Before 1993, it was almost impossible for adoptees to get that information. The search process was made easier when the responsibility moved from the Department of Institutions to the Department of Health and Human Services, but it still required a court order. Fosler got his on the basis of health so that he could be aware of problems that might arise as a result of his genetic background.
He learned that his mother's name was Mary Faye Archer and that she was from Gretna. He located an aunt of Archer's who had a photograph; one of her friends furnished another photo. He found that his birth mother had moved to California, married and had two daughters, his half sisters. He located one of them, Pam Lackowski, who was living in Newman Lake, Wash. She told him Mary Faye had become ill, moved to Tacoma, Wash., to be near a brother and died at age 35. Lackowski also sent him a picture of Mary Faye's grave.
Fosler met his wife, Ruth, while attending high school in Seward, though they didn't date until after he graduated. They have three children and live just a few miles north of the Industrial Home location, on land once owned by his grandfather.
***
In 1950, 84 girls and young women were admitted to the home. Seventy babies were born: 32 were relinquished for adoption, 34 were kept by their mothers, and decisions on four were still pending when the annual report was completed. The home's superintendent, Mary McGowan, suggested that one reason only 84 of the state's estimated 600 unmarried mothers that year had been sent to the home was its name.
A Lincoln newspaper clipping dated Jan. 18, 1951, quoted one state senator as calling unwed mothers lawbreakers and referring to the Industrial Home - by then called the Nebraska Maternity Home or the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers - as "an encouragement to break the law." In 1953, Gov. Robert Crosby, citing the Milford home's uniqueness in the United States, called for its closure, saying, "I do not think that Nebraska taxpayers are so affluent that they should indulge themselves in this exceptional activity." (He also wanted to close the Milford Trade School, now known as the Milford campus of Southeast Community College.)
But others spoke in favor of keeping the Milford maternity home open. The Rev. W.C. Iliff, a Milford minister, told the Legislature, "From this (moral and religious) standpoint, we need to think of these girls as having souls. There is more value here than just money." McGowan said she understood that caring for each woman at the Milford home cost Nebraska taxpayers 3 cents each. She asked the senators, "Aren't these girls worth the price of a 3-cent stamp?"
Sixty-six years after the Legislature had acted to build the maternity home, it voted in 1953 to close it. University of Nebraska officials had said unwed mothers could be adequately cared for at University Hospital in Omaha and the Child Saving Institute.
On June 23, 1953, the home closed its doors forever. The last expectant mother had left a week earlier, hundreds of maternity dresses were shipped to other institutions and all the staff packed up and set off for other jobs.
Superintendent McGowan estimated that more than 4,000 babies had been born at the home during its history.
The dorms were torn down in 1994.
On the site today is a facility serving those at the other end of life's spectrum: a retirement home, Sunrise Country Manor, built by the Stauffer family. Tim Stauffer and his three sons operate Sunrise. The only remaining part of the Industrial Home, the brick hospital where Dwaine Fosler was born, is attached to the home but used only for storage.
"I will always be grateful that the home was there to serve my birth mother in her time of need," Fosler said. "Perhaps there is still a need for the protection it offered her for the girls in today's society."
Reach Dave Carew at daviddcarew@stewireless.com.
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