Scott Atkinson: FLINT, MI — Ermina Hagerman could not have known she was sending her children to die.
It was November 1885, and it was a desperate time. Her husband, Charles, had died just a month before. He had enlisted in the Civil War at 14, lying about his age, and had survived it all. But now at 34, he was gone, leaving Ermina — or Minnie, as she would be known all her life — alone with their four children. It would have been impossible in such a time for her not to think of how she should have had five children, had they not already lost Leo, one of her oldest twin boys, when he was small.
Minnie was 33 years old. The year 1885 was not a time when you would expect a woman with four children to work, and anyway, the village of Constantine, where she lived, was not one of great opportunity. “Nothing spectacular about it, other than the St. Joseph river flowing through it,” as one local historian said.
Minnie applied for government assistance. She had family in nearby Three Rivers, but they could offer only so much help when it came to her children. Rice and Grace, her two youngest, twins, were deaf.
In this, at least, there was hope. In a city called Flint, halfway up the state, there was a new school operating under what was still a radical idea: Perhaps the deaf and blind could be taught. Perhaps they were capable of learning like the rest of society, capable of learning skills, contributing to and participating in the world, and communicating with it. Her children would have a chance at a future, a trade and a voice.
It was also a boarding school. Minnie’s child-rearing load would be halved. And so she traveled with them, one after the other, to the Michigan Asylum for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, and returned home.
She could not have known that she was sending them to their deaths, nor could she have known that in time, her two youngest children would come to be called orphans, lost to history and forgotten for more than a century until someone came to find them.
Leave a comment