Wounded Souls, Dried Tears, and Quilts: The Amazing Story of the Methodist Home for Children and Youth of the South Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church

After the war, the Reconstruction was hard on everyone in the South. The entire region was isolated, impoverished, and devastated. Three-fourths of the wealth in Georgia had disappeared. Slaves worth $272,000,000 were set free. Money, bonds, and stocks were worthless. Forty thousand citizens were dead or gone, and cities and countryside lay in waste. The defeat of the South in the Civil War and the economic deprivations and hardships of the Reconstruction produced an astounding number of children without caregivers capable of providing for their most basic needs. In the vernacular of the day, they were orphans, half-orphans, foundlings, homeless, neglected, or indigent. Their numbers were unprecedented. The United States had a total of 170 orphanages before the Civil War and more than 600 by 1890. The time was hard on nearly everyone, but particularly hard on those disadvantaged in any way. With little federal, state, or local provisions, orphans went largely without care. Even able-bodied adults were forced to struggle for sustenance. In Columbia, South Carolina, hundreds of people scraped by for months after the war by pick-ing up loose grain from where the occupying forces' horses were fed. General Ulysses S. Grant wrote home to his wife, 'The suffering that must exist in the South the next year will be beyond conception.' In the midst of these terrible circumstances was born the Methodist Home for Children and Youth,