PROVIDENCE -- Alice Pontes visited the former State Home and School for Children yesterday for only the second time since she came here with her five siblings around 1927.
Their father had gone off to California, leaving their mother to fend for herself and the five children -- Manuel, just three months old; Elizabeth, 4; Alice, 5; Joseph, 6; and Walter, 8.
She had a nervous breakdown.
The authorities took her to a mental hospital and put the children in the State Home, on the 80-acre former Chapin Farm, at the end of a country road off Smith Street in Mount Pleasant.
"I remember the day," Pontes recalled yesterday, sitting in the parlor of what was then the superintendent's house. "I can still see it in my mind."
It's been 75 years, and of the Mello siblings, only Alice survives. She came to her old home to partake in a project by Rhode Island College and the Department of Children, Youth and Families to study the orphanage's history and pay tribute to the thousands of children who lived here between 1885 and 1979.
The college now owns the old State Home grounds, and has made them its East Campus -- the old dorms turned into offices and classrooms. But most of the original structures are long gone, replaced in the 1950s by squat brick buildings. Only the superintendent's mansion remains, now RIC's Forman Center, along with one very dilapidated wooden "cottage" behind it.
The DCYF occupied much of the campus until the 1990s, and the State Home's records were always meticulously preserved -- but barely touched over the decades. And though many RIC scholars study child-welfare issues and social history, no one had paid close attention to the historical gem next door.
Then, in March of last year, as the Trinity Repertory Company was preparing to stage John Irving's The Cider House Rules, which is set in an orphanage in Maine, a researcher asked the DCYF for help tracking down the history of orphanages in Rhode Island.
DCYF investigator Richard Hillman looked in the agency's archives and found piles of leather-bound books from the State Home. Poring through them, he discovered "some extraordinarily important and extraordinarily compelling information," Hillman told an audience of about 80 people, including at least a dozen former orphanage residents, in an auditorium in the State Home's former boiler room.
Since then, numerous historians, children's advocates, and former orphanage residents have joined in the research. Rhode Island College, which has several scholars working on the project, has also embraced it as part of its sesquicentennial celebration.
The collaborators have already reconstructed a great deal of the State Home's history -- though what remains could provide fodder for many years of work.
ARMED WITH the DCYF's extensive collection of records from the State Home, as well as other contemporary documents, RIC sociologist Sandra Enos has begun to profile the orphanage's early residents, and to outline their lives:
They came from throughout Rhode Island, often taken from their parents' homes, or from local poorhouses. More than 90 percent were not true orphans, although about a quarter were missing one parent; they had been sent there after being abandoned, or because their parents had been deemed unfit due to poverty, substance abuse, or mental problems.
Half the children were ages 6 to 10, the rest older or younger. Boys outnumbered girls almost 2 to 1. About half the children came with their siblings; the rest came alone. Just under half eventually returned to their families.
The children came from all ethnic backgrounds, reflecting, over time, the waves of migration into Rhode Island and the poverty of the newcomers -- especially Irish and Italian families. Many were indentured as servants and farm hands; at the home, they did farm work and household chores.
RIC ANTHROPOLOGIST E. Pierre Morenon has begun to literally dig into the State Home's past, leading an excavation project that so far has uncovered numerous marbles, buttons, and other remnants of the children's toys and clothes.
MEANWHILE, anthropology student Susan Hughs has begun collecting personal stories from former residents going as far back as the 1920s and as recently as the late 1970s, when the home, renamed the Patrick O'Rourke Children's Center, was used only as a stopover for children who were to be placed in foster homes.
The stories cover the gamut, from Aime Waterman's happy reminiscences of his stay there in the 1940s, after his mother -- like Alice Pontes's -- suffered a nervous breakdown, to memories of sorrow and loss.
Debra DiScuillo, now an aide to Governor Almond, was at the O'Rourke Center twice in the 1970s, in between foster homes. Talking about it makes her voice shaky, and her eyes moist.
"It was quite the experience to be here," she said.
She heard a couple of years ago that the place where she'd lived was now part of the RIC campus, and she came to explore the grounds. She went into her former dormitory, now an office building. When she found out that there was a research project under way, she eagerly volunteered to help.
"You really can't get enough of it," she said. "It's fascinating, and it's part of my history and that of many other residents. It's great to know that all the children who walked thorugh here will be recognized. . . . It's also a way for me to put an end to that chapter."
ALICE PONTES doesn't like to remember her time at the State Home. It was "really horrid," she said yesterday. "I don't have good memories of this place."
Upon arriving at the orphanage, the Mello children were separated, the boys sent to the boys' cottage, the girls to the girls' cottage. Manuel died not long after; "I don't know what they did with his body."
Pontes recalls herself as a homely child, "very shy and scared." She was also a bed-wetter; "I think I was scared to go to the bathroom at night."
The attendants were impatient, Pontes said. "They were very mean. I had to strip the bed, and they punished me. I think I got beatings, and I had to get on my hands and knees and polish the floor."
About six months after arriving, the Mello boys were taken away.
"I remember running down with my sister -- I don't know how we heard that our brothers were leaving the home. We chased after them, crying, because we thought we'd never see them again."
The boys had gone into a foster home, and about six months later, the girls joined them. They never lived with their parents again, though their mother was given visitations, and their father sneaked up to the foster home to see them.
"I don't know what made me come today and remember all those bad things," Pontes said.
But somehow, Alice overcame her painful childhood. She was married twice -- the second time, very happily -- and has two children, four grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. "I had a very good life."
Now, like DiScuillo, she's hoping to find answers in the State Home project.
"I'm happy," she said, "because maybe they'll let me know what happened to my baby brother."
