Grade 7 Social Studies

CHAPTER 1: EMPOWERMENT

A Legacy of Disempowerment

This Plaque placed outside 51 Avon Street, Stratford, Ontario was dedicated on August 19, 2001 to honour the contribution of Home Children to Canada.

Home children at an arrival stage in Saint John, NB.

A boy plowing at a farm in Russell, Manitoba, c. 1900.

Immigrant girls for the Stratford House, Ontario.

Immigrant boys for the Stratford House, Ontario.

My next assignment was to a place called Pontypool, Ontario, 13 miles north of Newcastle. It was a dairy farm rented by a husband and wife. A strange boy about 14 came there with me. We were allowed to go to school for about six months and then this man took us out of school to work full time on the farm. The wife was kind and gentle, but the husband was unscrupulous, vicious, dirty, and lazy. We were beaten every day or so for the smallest things. The wife would come to our rescue but she would only be cast aside by this crazed being. This man once put my friend on the big stove and held him there until his clothes began to burn. To this day I frequently have nightmares about this part of my life. In each case this brute appears and is endeavouring to grab me. I have a summer cottage about 75 miles north of Pontypool and I sometimes drive past this farm. Something seems to draw me back. These people have gone from there long ago. I did not try to keep track of them.

An excerpt from

“The Home Children”

The Holy Rosary Parish Rectory on Wellington Street, Ottawa, formerly known as St. George's Home, was the main receiving centre for Catholic home children until the last child arrived in the early 1930s. It had been used as a main distribution centre for Home Children since c.1895.

Children from overcrowded cities in Britain were sent to Canada as indentured servants, to work on farms in Ontario until 18. Most home children left the farms and settled in the cities - Ottawa, Toronto and Hamilton.

Books on The Home Children

Two stones at Notre Dame Cemetery in Ottawa commemorate 23 of the possibly 100,000 children who were sent to Canada decades ago. They were buried long ago and almost forgotten -- poor "home children" who died in their teens or twenties and were buried in numbered graves.

Liverpool Sheltering Home Ad, 1920

British Records of Home Children

The oldest was 18, the youngest 6, and they watched their homeland recede in their wake as the Hibernian steamed down the Firth of Clyde, en route for Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was 19 March 1891, and the 129 boys on board were orphans, from Quarriers homes - established in Renfrewshire less than 20 years before - making the 2,650-mile Atlantic crossing to Canada in the hope of a better life than they might otherwise find in Scotland. One can scarcely imagine what the feelings of these orphans, particularly the younger ones, must have been as they headed for the open sea and an unknown future, but their names and ages can still be seen, entered neatly in the ship's passenger list, with "Quarriers party" written tellingly on the first of the three pages. Between 1871 and 1938, an incredible 7,000 "home children" of both sexes were dispatched to Canada by Quarriers alone. Other orphanages, such as Barnardo's, or the Middlemore Homes in England, also sent children to Canada, as well as to other colonial outposts such as Australia.

Hazelbrae House. The Barnardo's girls receiving home in Peterborough, Ontario. This building no longer exists.

An 1877 image of the Stafford home which, remarkably, remains little changed to this day.

The Stafford house in 2002.