Home boys, orphans, hermits and Murphey School

Peggy Rollins called a few weeks back. Though she lives in Atlanta most of the time, Peggy and her husband, Randall, have a home on Lewes Beach, and she keeps tabs on her hometown and the people she grew up with.

Peggy called about a column I had written that mentioned a Lewes character named Jonesy. Jonesy tilled people’s garden plots for them each spring and could often be seen tooling around the streets of town from one plot to another on one of those old, squat Ford tractors. Jonesy helped out Alma Bryan at her house on Second Street. They sat together sometimes at Groome United Methodist Church where Alma would conduct a blanket drive each year to help people who needed warmth in other parts of the world. They were both kind and sweet, grew old together, and enjoyed laughter and smiling.

“Jonesy was a home boy,” Peggy told me. “He lived with the Carpenters at their farm out at Carpenter’s Corner and helped them out in return for meals and a place to live.” I’ve often heard the term ‘home boys’ through the years. Peggy confirmed my sense of them. “They were boys who came from group homes - something like orphanages - and were taken in by other families to help out and be raised.” They often ended up on farms where extra help was always needed and appreciated.

The Carpenter farm occupied the land now bounded by Kings Highway, Dartmouth Drive and Route 1.

Several commercial structures have taken the place of the classic old Carpenter farmhouse that stood across from Parsell’s funeral home. At one time the farm included a dairy barn and several other outbuildings associated with a 20th-century Sussex farm.

Peggy said brothers Clarence and Walter Carpenter operated the farm. They married sisters, Carrie and Lil, and all together - with the help of Jonesy - they pastured, fed, and milked the cows, grew their feed, and tended gardens that provided for their own table. No doubt Jonesy learned his skills at tilling garden plots by working for the Carpenters.

Hermits and orphans

Many decades ago, my brothers and sisters and I would pile in the station wagon on Sunday afternoons when my father drove back and forth between his jewelry store in Chestertown and his father’s jewelry store in Dover. Sometimes we would meet halfway in Sudlersville. That’s the hometown of old-time baseball slugger Jimmy Foxx. Other times we went all the way.

My grandfather worked on clocks and watches. Before my father learned the craft, he would take them to my grandfather. They would trade broken watches and clocks for fixed timepieces, and the cycle continued for a few years. Business.

On the way over, we would drive through a section of thick woods where we would often see box turtles crossing the road. In one section, my father would point out a collection of small buildings a ways back in the woods. One of them was a small shack, one story, with a window or two and a variety of shingles on the outside. There were pieces of fence here and there, small lean-tos for chickens and pigs, and other nondescript stuff. Pop would say, “Keep an eye out for the hermit. That’s where the hermit lives.” And every once in awhile we would stretch our necks and see a lone figure making his way among some of the buildings. We didn’t know much about hermits - I still don’t - but we did figure out that a hermit was someone who lived alone and liked it that way.

My father pointed out another distinctive collection of buildings sometimes when we made our way through Dover. They were red brick, well-tended and neat, but we rarely saw people around them. “That’s the Murphey School,” he told us. “An orphanage. Children who don’t have families live there.” He stated it as a matter of fact, not to say “straighten your acts” or “count your blessings” or anything like that. But it still sunk in.

A little research on the internet told me that a Dover man named Sanford Sayre Murphey established the school in 1922 to help abandoned, orphaned or abused children. He named it in honor of his mother, Elizabeth W. Murphey, and funded its construction and operation with considerable wealth he accumulated after leaving Dover, as a young man, for Chicago. From his Chicago offices he operated a number of profitable coal mines and credited his success to always treating his employees fairly and kindly. The Murphey School continues to carry on the noble mission today.

Peggy’s observation about Jonesy can’t help but make me wonder whether the Murphey School was one of the homes where men like him started out as children, before being taken in by farm and other Delaware families as home boys, and having a better life.