Survivors of Burlington’s St. Joseph’s Orphanage — a long-shuttered institution with a dark legacy of abuse — gathered with supporters and public officials in Kieslich Park Friday afternoon to celebrate the unveiling of a memorial in their honor.
The project is the result of years of organizing by former orphanage residents that followed a public reckoning over the long-ignored abuse they suffered there. It features an elegant archway made of stripped black locust tree branches, designed and built by artist Clay Mohrman, that frames a footpath leading to Lake Champlain.
Boulders engraved with messages from survivors dot the path, including both uplifting poems and somber acknowledgments of the suffering children endured over the orphanage’s 140-year history. It is flanked by community garden plots, and sits just steps from the site of the former orphanage, which is now an apartment complex on North Avenue in the Cambrian Rise development.
“This memorial healing space is our biggest and last major project that we set out to accomplish from the restorative justice inquiry,” Brenda Hannon, an orphanage survivor, said to the crowd of roughly 80 who gathered in the park. “We hope this space provides healing, peace, laughter, reflection and joy.”
Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage, a group made up of some of the institution’s last survivors, worked with Burlington’s Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department to design the memorial. It took years of planning and is funded by the State of Vermont, the City of Burlington, the Pomerleau Family Foundation, and donations from more than 50 individuals and small foundations.
During the ceremony, speakers, including people who lived in the orphanage as youngsters, reflected on the years of work that it took to arrive at this point and the ongoing trauma they live with.
Standing before a podium under the archway, Debi Gevry, 62, spoke of the 10 years she and her siblings lived at the orphanage before it closed in 1974. Her father, an auto mechanic, placed them there thinking they would be better off, she said.
“He now lives with the shame and the guilt of what happened to his children,” Gevry said between tears. “My children also have suffered through many nights with their mother emotionally unavailable to their needs.
“I have unknowingly passed on my fears and anxiety to the next generation,” she said. “This is just a small example of the ripple effect emotional and physical abuse carries. I have yet to heal from the traumas hidden deep in my soul. I may never be completely whole, but I will not be silenced.”
In the 1990s, some orphanage survivors began to come forward with stories of abuse they suffered at the hands of nuns and other personnel. Some sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington and the Sisters of Providence, which ran the orphanage.
In 2018, this issue was brought back into the spotlight following a news article published in BuzzFeed, which relied on court records from the former lawsuits and on interviews with former residents to detail horrific abuse.
The article sparked a state investigation into the allegations. Over two years, a state task force led by the state Attorney General’s Office interviewed nearly 50 people who once lived at the orphanage. In 2020, the task force released a 150-page report on its findings, which included credible evidence of rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse by the nuns and priests who ran the orphanage.
Former lieutenant governor Molly Gray, who was part of the task force, spoke at the ceremony about the work she did to investigate their allegations.
“It was an extremely hard journey, one that was full of heartbreak and also real revelations of systemic failure by a number of institutions, including the state of Vermont,” Gray said.
After the task force’s findings, no charges were filed: The abuse had happened decades earlier, and the statute of limitations had long expired. In response, Voices of St. Joseph’s pushed for reform, and in 2019 the state legislature eliminated the statute of limitations for civil actions for victims of childhood sexual abuse. Two years later, it did the same for cases of childhood physical abuse.
“Former residents and survivors — you all today — became tremendous advocates and changed so much of what happens here in the state of Vermont,” Gray said. “The community came together, not only to remember the past, but to truly, truly reshape the future for the next generation.”
At the end of the ceremony, survivors cut a ribbon hanging across the archway. Then they walked through it, their arms linked.
