The House of the Good Shepherd: A Late Nineteenth Century Orphanage on the Banks of the Hudson River

Jenifer C. Elam. RPA

The House of the Good Shepherd: A Late Nineteenth Century Orphanage on the Banks of the Hudson River

Year: 2016

Summary

In 1866, Reverend Ebenezer Gay became the guardian of six orphaned children. The home he would make for these children and many others, known as the House of the Good Shepherd in Tomkins Cove, New York, was a self-sufficient, working farm that taught the children hard work and responsibility and also acted as the hub of Reverend Gay’s mission work in the community. While some of the site’s architectural history is still extant, much of its archaeology is obscured by the structural debris left on site after the buildings were demolished; however, the surviving documentary record is rich in detail of the lifeways of the orphans and Reverend Gay and will be further examined as one of the primary components of the alternative mitigation data recovery for this rare site in New York: a privately-owned orphanage.

Cite this Record

The House of the Good Shepherd: A Late Nineteenth Century Orphanage on the Banks of the Hudson River. Jenifer C. Elam. RPA. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434691)