Museum volunteer restores children's cemetery, but work 'nowhere near done'

A year ago, many of the names of the children buried at the Minnesota State Public School Orphanage Museum were illegible, obscured by a century’s worth of grime and lichen growth.

That’s the state Tim Shea found the headstones in on his first visit to the cemetery. Many visits later, Shea has discovered much more than each child’s name.

With the approval of the Steele County Historical Society, Shea has spent his available weekends painstakingly cleaning the original headstones in the cemetery. He took a break over the winter, returning this spring to finish the job. Even now that the final stone is clean, the project continues to expand beyond its initial scope.

“I thought, I’m just going to clean the stones and that’s it. But I’ve gotten so involved with the children themselves and their stories,” Shea said.

According to Shea, restoring each headstone required two to three hours of work. He used the same cleaning agent the National Park Service uses on memorials, and over two gallons of water per grave. While museum records indicated only 47 of the graves were marked with a headstone, he discovered 52 while inventorying them — one of the many mysteries his project has turned up.

The cemetery contains the remains of 198 children who died at the orphanage, which operated from 1886 to 1945. Over 10,000 children lived at the orphanage in that timeframe. Infectious diseases spread readily due to the communal living conditions, with pneumonia, diphtheria and measles accounting for many of the deaths at the orphanage. While orphanage staff cared for the children according to the standards of their time, most of the children would’ve likely survived were they treated today.

Shea, a marketing specialist based in the Twin Cities, first visited the orphanage museum with his girlfriend Linda Donadei last year, during a series of day trips they took to various points of interest in Minnesota. On the drive back, they lamented the state of the graves, with Shea wondering aloud who was going to put the work in to restore them.

“You are,” Donadei told him.

Hundreds of work hours later, he’s completed the task she charged him with. However, Shea’s not treating the last grave he cleaned as the finish line — rather, it’s a major milestone in an ever-expanding research and restoration project.

With the headstones restored, Shea has set his sights on the next phase. After the initial rows of graves were filled, the orphanage stopped using headstones. Children buried after that point were given small markers with their case numbers — no names, ages or dates of death. The museum has since identified those graves and marked each with a cross and the child’s name. The crosses were installed in 1992 and are made out of a hardy composite material, but even those have begun to accrue lichen and grime. Cleaning the crosses is one of his next priorities. He also hopes to protect some of the more cracked headstones, fearing that the freezing and thawing cycles of Minnesota winters will worsen the damage in coming years.

Even with all the work he’s put in, Shea admits he’s not ready for the project to be done. While many people facing upcoming retirement don’t know what to do next, he’s got the rest of his life figured out.

“The day it is done is probably the day before I die,” he laughed.

When he wasn’t busy scrubbing headstones, Shea continued hunting for any information he could find on the children. In that task, he’s found a kindred spirit in Museum Manager Anne Peterson. They’ve pored over countless pages of orphanage records, census data and any relevant documents they could get their hands on, sharing whatever breakthroughs they have with one another.

“Tim has a contagious passion that has kind of regenerated some of the interest that I have. We’ve uncovered areas that need more investigation, and more stories to tell. To me, the research and sharing the stories is the really exciting part. I don’t want the kids just to be the 10,000 kids. They each had a different story,” said Peterson.

Telling these stories often means correcting errors and discrepancies in the historical record.

A little girl named Mary Barrett died and was buried at the orphanage in 1902, while her younger sister Hattie was buried two years later under the surname Barnett, apparently a typographical error. Finnish names in particular were plagued by misspellings, and Peterson has even enlisted the aid of a Finnish historical society to correct the record in two cases. The headstone of Emanuel Johnson gives his date of death as September 20, 1904 but orphanage records indicate he died months earlier in May of that year. According to Shea, the later date recorded on the boy’s tombstone is actually the day his parents were informed of his death.

The back row of graves presents one of the strangest cases. Between the crosses stands a headstone marking the grave of Byron K. Savor. He died in 1931, years after the orphanage stopped using headstones. It’s unclear why Savor received a headstone when all the other children who died in those years were buried namelessly.

For both Shea and Peterson, every answer leads to another question.

From the beginning, Shea has been motivated by a sense of respect and compassion for the children who lived such short, tragic lives. Through genealogy research, he even discovered a distant relative in the cemetery — Chester McLaughlin, who died of tuberculosis in 1890, was his 13th cousin. Shea found himself growing angry at the parents who gave their children up, consigning them to their fates. However, Chester’s story is one of many that softened his perspective. Chester was sent to the orphanage after his mother died. Records indicate that his father, a Civil War veteran, had lost the use of his hands and was unable to care for the boy. Upon further research, Shea discovered Chester’s father had been wounded in the second battle of Corinth and released from the army — the likely source of his disability.

Other children were sent to the orphanage after their mothers were institutionalized, perhaps unjustly. While some children were undoubtedly sent to the orphanage due to parental abuse or negligence, he’s come to learn that many of the parents’ stories are as tragic as the children’s.

While his work is bittersweet, Shea’s enthusiasm for the project remains undimmed. In speaking with people during his visits to Owatonna, he’s been surprised to learn how many know little about the orphanage and the cemetery.

“It’s such a hidden gem of Minnesota,” said Shea. “When it’s in your own backyard, I think you tend to ignore it.”

In the future, he’d like to see a well-maintained garden in the cemetery, or at least more visitors paying their respects to the children.

Donadei, who spends most of the year in Florida, helped Shea clean the final stones on a recent visit. Returning to the cemetery, she was stunned to see how the once-neglected cemetery had transformed in his care.

“To me, it shows what one person can do in a community. I’m guilty of this too — in your own neighborhood there’s something that you really find needs to be improved or taken care of. You’re always just saying, gee it’s a shame nobody does that. Well, you could do it,” she said.