'It was a wonderful life here'

One of last living orphans recalls time in Warrenton
Posted 5/7/14

For a couple of hours one day last month, Jean Gaulding Bates was a fountain of living history. The 93-year-old California resident sat in the center of a group of enthralled history buffs at the …

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'It was a wonderful life here'

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For a couple of hours one day last month, Jean Gaulding Bates was a fountain of living history. The 93-year-old California resident sat in the center of a group of enthralled history buffs at the Warren County Historical Society and shared first-hand stories of growing up in Warrenton as an orphan at the Central Wesleyan Orphan Home. Bates, who lives in La Cresenta, Calif., and her granddaughter Michele Butler from Edmund, Okla., were on a road trip they based around Warrenton as Bates’ childhood home. “I love Warrenton,” Bates exclaimed, firing off recollections of so many people, places, events and experiences that people huddled inside the museum library scrambled to take it all in. It’s not every day you get an opportunity to hear a first-hand account from one of the last living residents of Warrenton’s famed orphanage. Central Wesleyan College and Orphan Asylum as it was known in the latter 1800s originally were set up to provide homes for orphans of the Civil War and as a higher education institution for youth of the German Church in the West. Bates’ stories of life in and around the orphanage are remarkable. Her mother died in 1925, leaving her widowed husband with 13 children in Hoisington, Kan. Eight of the brood — including Jean — were shepherded east to Warrenton and the orphanage. She and her siblings saw each other regularly at meals, but most activities and accommodations were organized by a peer group, which steered her to others at the orphanage. Her brother Dylan, 11 months younger, was among the siblings at the orphanage and is still living. “My children and grandchildren say, ‘Oh, we feel so bad that you were brought up in an orphanage,’ but I tell them it was a wonderful life here,” said Bates. “We were free to go all over the place here, just like the kids in town with families,” she said. In fact, Bates is finishing a memoir she’s titled, “No Fences.” Proof of that freedom is a picture postcard of her at age 13 in an airplane that had visited the town’s Farmers’ Picnic and offered rides to children. The photo appeared in the St. Louis Globe’s “brown section” of outstate news coverage, she and Gene Cornell explained. “Everything was connected then — the college, the (orphanage) home and the town,” said Bates. Bates said that when she arrived at the orphanage, an older girl, Blanche Hargis Trusty, was assigned to help take care of her and provide emotional support. Bates’ own older sister was assigned to help care for their younger brother, so Blanche was a godsend, and the two remained close throughout their lives. Trusty even introduced Bates and her husband. At the time she and her siblings were at the orphanage, there were about 135 children living and being educated there, Bates said. As she and others at the museum exchanged names from Warrenton history, her granddaughter chuckled about how people in small towns seem to know everyone’s name, no matter how far back in time they go. “Wilhelmina Schulz taught us her first year of teaching,” Bates explained , referring to one of Warrenton’s most tenured teachers and residents. She recalled prior visits here in which she could often find someone just by stopping and asking someone in their front yard or mowing the grass if he or she knew the whereabouts of someone like Miss Schulz or Jewell Hannar, also a teacher at the orphanage. “Well, I just saw her walk by a little while ago,” Bates said she recalled in one instance, which also brought laughter from her granddaughter. For years, alumni would come to Warrenton for reunions, many of which are documented in photos kept in a green album that Bates and others looked through on Friday. “We all stayed in contact with each other,” she said. “I sent Christmas cards to everyone all along.” Bates credits her Warrenton upbringing for an industrious life. After marriage and motherhood, at age 50, she went into nursing, studying at Firmin Desloge Hospital, now part of St. Louis University Hospitals. She became a licensed practical nurse (LPN). “I got the background here in Warrenton,” said Bates, who said her siblings also grew to be upstanding, educated adults. One sister married a cousin of Russian Czar Nicholas II. Bates took up painting and writing later in life and says she enjoys both pursuits. Some time ago, Bates found letters written by her mother before her death, a tie to the mother she lost so early in life that gives her strength, she said. She also has a dress her mother crocheted for her as a baby. Bates could have talked into the evening, but her granddaughter reminded her of the time, and that they needed to get back on the road. Museum leaders say they can’t wait to get the text of her book to add more to their body of knowledge from the era from Bates’ eyewitness view.

Jean Gaulding Bates, left, and granddaughter Michele Butler look at a photo postcard of Bates as a young girl taking a ride on an airplane in Warrenton in the mid-1900s.


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