HopeTree Family Services is quiet during the day. The wind flows through the trees that surround the cottages, and cars drive slowly over a narrow road leading up to the property, which separates it from its neighbors in Salem. The buildings have red brick facades with porches out front, white pillars framing them. Once every couple of minutes a child might walk out of the Academy building.
A short ride on a golf cart from the main grounds takes you to the equine therapy center, where children can interact with horses as a form of therapy. The stables overlook a small lake with a pavilion, situated in a bowl created by the mountains surrounding it. The gym sits empty, as do many of the cottages, frozen in time by their outdated interior design and decorations. In one building, a bathroom sports a dated red porcelain countertop and a black-and-white checkered tile floor. In a cottage near the administration building, souvenirs from the home — sports uniforms, newspaper articles — are kept for visiting alumni, and a table is set for a meal to resemble what a dining hall might have looked like before HopeTree was HopeTree.
The organization serves children and families around Salem with a variety of therapeutic and social support services. This land has always served children, but it hasn’t always looked like this — hundreds of children once lived together here, cared for by the Virginia Baptist Children’s Orphanage, later renamed the Virginia Baptist Children’s Home.
The site has gone through many changes since it was an orphanage, and it’s still changing today. After months of often-contentious debate among Salem residents, the city council is expected to take a final vote Monday night on a request to rezone a large portion of the land to allow for commercial and residential development.
As the property enters its next phase, five people who spent part of their childhoods in the Virginia Baptist Children’s Home look back on their time there and how it influenced their lives.
The wake-up bell
Ollie Pickral knew his life was different from other kids’ pretty early on. He said this became apparent in grade school in the 1950s.
He remembers in his first grade class photo, he’s wearing an old, faded cowboy jacket — a stark difference from what the other boys in his class wore. He walked a mile to school every day in the rain and snow. The other kids always seemed to have money to spend on soft drinks that he didn’t have. When the other kids got out of the Salem public schools at the end of the day, they played downtown and went home to their families. Pickral worked in the field.
The boy’s day was based around a farmer’s schedule, typically beginning with a 4 a.m. wake-up bell that rang, which meant it was time to milk the cows. He said the bell “must have woken up the entire town of Salem.” Then, he had to pasteurize the milk and bring all the glass gallon jugs to the dining hall, and later he ate breakfast around 6 a.m. before going to school. After school, it was straight back to the farm for the afternoon milking.
This story, while not the norm for other children growing up in Salem, is consistent with the experiences of other children who stayed at the Virginia Baptist Children’s Orphanage during the mid- to late 20th century.
The orphanage was one of two — the other being the Lutheran Children’s Home of the South — of “Virginia’s finest homes for homeless children,” according to the summer 1999 edition of “A Guide to Historic Salem.” The Baptist Assembly of Virginia opened this orphanage in 1889, settling in Salem on 16 acres that were donated. Some 87 adjacent acres were later donated, and the orphanage was turned into a farm.
Right around the time Pickral was staying at Virginia Baptist, foster care and adoption started becoming more popular than orphanages. The orphanage still provided homes for around 200 to 250 children at this time.
Pickral was 5 years old when he was brought to the orphanage in 1952 with his older brother, who was 8, after his father died. He remembers being terrified — he had been in a car only once or twice before and said the large building approaching through his car window looked scary. He was upset once he learned he would be staying in a cottage for the younger boys. Pickral said his brother’s cottage was maybe 50 steps away from his, but the distance felt immense for the young boy.
“I didn’t have an inkling that life was going to be better,” he said. “I had no idea where I was going or what was going to happen to me.”
Pickral’s father died when he was 4, and his mother was “mentally 12 years old,” he said. After growing up in “extreme poverty” in Newport News, he found the orphanage to be a considerable improvement.
The initial shock of his new home faded. Pickral recalls always having a comfortable place to sleep and food to eat. And every child had a job.
Pickral went on to fight in Vietnam for a year from 1968 to 1969. He lived in Dallas, Texas, with his ex-wife and daughter for over 20 years. Pickral, now 77 years old, lives in Kilmarnock, Virginia, in a house he built right on the water of the Chesapeake Bay.
Squirrel’s corner of the world
Jackie Dee Cunningham arrived at the home at 11 years old in 1959 with three of his eight siblings. He remembers the same early wake-ups and the afternoon chores.
He said they ate “good, wholesome food” that they grew — corn, potatoes, green beans and chicken.
It was a lot of work, he said, “but when you’re young and you have companions, it wasn’t that bad.”
John Long, who previously ran the Salem Museum and Historical Society, said child labor laws go back to the Great Depression, but he thinks because this was a part of the children’s “education and training, that it was sort of allowed.”
“I’ve never heard anybody who particularly complained or called on child labor laws for it,” he said of the kids’ busy schedules helping out at the home. “Frankly, a lot of kids could benefit from getting up earlier.”
Cunningham, who was nicknamed “Squirrel” by Pickral for hiding bags of pecans under his bed, worked in the print shop. They printed the Salem Baptist Church’s bulletin there.
Cunningham, who is now 78, is happy. He’s active on Facebook in a group he calls “Jack’s Corner of the World.” Here, he posts daily — inspirational quotes, stock photos of puppies, pictures taken by a waitress of a meal with his wife and friends, videos of him playing guitar and singing. He spreads positivity wherever he can.
Cunningham didn’t always have a good attitude on life. Growing up, he said, “I was a loner and a rebel.” He didn’t have an easy time making friends. He was taken from his mother, who he said had a learning disability, and “you didn’t know that until she spoke.” He said she drank and fought. He lived with his great-aunt and great-grandmother from ages 3 to 11 until they were no longer able to take care of him and his siblings.
“Our families were not wholesome,” he said of his own family and those of other children at the home. “Once you come from a broken home, you’re likely to break up a home yourself.”
Living at the home, he said, was a hard transition. “I was rejected by the fellow children.”
It took Cunningham years and lots of rejected support from the home’s staffers to get him on the right track — his entire identity had to be rediscovered within the home, including his name.
When Cunningham arrived at the home, he was named Forest Peyton Tyree. But after the home told him they could not find a birth certificate, they allowed him to pick out a new name for himself.
He said he heard the name Jackie Dee on the radio and immediately knew that would be his name — even though he was told by many that it was a “girl’s name.” He didn’t care.
Young Cunningham decided he’d stop going to school when he was 16, in 1964. He wasn’t one to follow directions, he said. He got a job as a film developer at the Salem Times-Register.
One night, he stayed at the printing press late, and when he arrived back to the home, he said he was beaten by his house parents for being tardy. He ran away that day.
Unprepared to be on the run in the pouring rain, Cunningham got from Salem to Roanoke on foot, freezing cold and soaked to the bone, when he found an old Chevrolet that he decided to sit in for warmth. He found the keys sitting in the ignition and decided to drive.
“The excitement and my need for warmth overwhelmed my good senses,” he said. After what he’d done sunk in, he turned himself into the police. Rather than taking him into custody, the police officer took him home for a hot meal.
Cunningham later in life found that officer and thanked him for that day.
Later on, Cunningham left the home to go to the Natural Bridge Forester Camp and went to fight in Vietnam directly from there at 18 years old.
During his time in the home, he said, “You wouldn’t believe the energy they put into trying to get me interested in [something.]” He said they offered psychiatrists to children who were struggling and would pay to send anyone to college.
“I wish I had taken advantage of what they had to offer,” he said.
Mr. Hough Jr., the superintendent of the home at the time, tried to “love me rather than punish me.” Cunningham said he couldn’t adapt to this.
When he arrived back in the States at 20 years old, he again found himself in a time of unforeseen transition — this time, his newfound freedom was the challenge.
“I went completely nuts,” he said. “I had been institutionalized since I was 11.”
Cunningham now works as a part-time private investigator. He said most kids who grew up in the home turned out to be successful — and credits the staff and resources the home provided for this success.
He lives in Bedford with his wife, Judy, who paints pictures for him of old buildings he grew up in at the home.
Recently, the pecan tree that Cunningham cherished as a kid was destroyed in Hurricane Helene. HopeTree, at Cunningham’s request, carved off planks of wood that he is using to make artwork to display around his home, surrounded by Judy’s paintings.
Scrapbook to Facebook
Dolly Grantham’s small yet cozy condo was already decked out for fall in early September — strings of crunchy plastic leaves spread on all surfaces, ceramic pumpkins displayed on tabletops, the living room smelling of cinnamon. Dressed in a bright yellow vest, with a bright red lip that framed her smile, she flipped through a full scrapbook of memories from the home.
She’s now in her late 70s and still lives in Salem. Grantham’s childhood, mostly in the 1950s, echoes that of the other adults who grew up in the Virginia Baptist Children’s Home. But when Grantham went to sleep at night, she was in her own room and her own house. She grew up in a home adjacent to HopeTree.
She differed from her friends in that she had a family to take care of her growing up. Her whole family worked at Virginia Baptist: Her great-uncle and dad were farmers, and her mother worked in the commercial laundry room. Her grandmother also worked in the laundry room and was a dietician at the home, and her grandfather was a night watchman.
Even though she didn’t stay at the home like the other kids, her family was heavily connected to it. Her own house was just across the street.
“Everyone just looked at you as one of them,” she said. She remembers roller skating with the other kids at the home every day and tending to some 400 chickens with her brother — feeding them, collecting eggs, and washing and delivering eggs.
“It was kind of fun, really,” she said, “Except for fighting with my brother.”
Grantham’s mother took her to work every day with her, and Grantham spent every afternoon at the home. She said she lived by the same bell schedule that those kids lived by — a “get up” bell, a breakfast bell, a lunch bell, a dinner bell, and, in the summer, a bell telling each group to gather for swimming.
She remembers Wednesday nights as “girls’ night” to play basketball in the gym that was built in 1955 or 1956, she said. She recollects the giant dining hall, where all the children would eat, which reminds her of the one at Hogwarts from the Harry Potter series — in the movies, a giant dining hall with long tables and candles floating above them.
She witnessed many transitions at the home while her parents worked there.
In the 1960s-70s, the home started taking in more at-risk youth, as orphans just weren’t as common anymore as they had been in post-Civil War days.
Leonard Muse said in the summer 1999 edition of “A Guide to Historic Salem” that when he joined the home’s board in 1926, 80% of the children in the home were orphans. By the end of the 1980s, he said only 2% were true orphans.
“The diseases that caused orphans in the earlier years had largely been controlled,” the article said — diseases like tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever and malaria, which caused “unthinkable levels” of orphans in the post-Civil War years. The home was renamed the Virginia Baptist Children’s Home in 1953 to better represent children from dysfunctional families who were receiving care there.
In 1961, Virginia Baptist closed the commercial laundry Grantham’s mother had worked in and that she’d grown up helping in.
The farmland was sold off while her father worked there. He worked for three years with a hook after his hand was amputated in an accident with the heavy-duty farming equipment. He retired in 1968.
Grantham took after her family and worked at HopeTree herself, starting in 2004. She worked in reception, human resources and accounting.
She said the highlight of working at HopeTree was using her resources there to reconnect with a friend from the home, Bessie, with her brother after they’d been separated as kids.
Grantham had a best friend at the home who was put into foster care. They hadn’t spoken in 60 years.
She recently found her old friend on Facebook, and they reconnected after all that time. She flipped through photos of the two of them in her scrapbook. The friend died early this year.
‘They gave us a life there’
Bob Adams got into a fight one hour into living at Virginia Baptist.
“There was never a dull moment there,” Adams, who is now 72 years old, said. “You learned to fight pretty quick.”
He remembers the home having two horses you could ride — if you could catch them, you could ride them, he said. “A lot of broken arms … a lot of fun.”
Adams arrived at the home in 1962, with his younger brother and sister. He was there for just about three years. He and his siblings lived in separate cottages, which he said often happened to give the kids each a better chance at adoption.
The “cottage system” that Virginia Baptist used had become popular in the first quarter of the 20th century — family-like settings run by matrons.
He said at the home, “They let you find your talent.” For Adams, this meant performing at the church talent show that would raise money for the orphanage.
Adams recited a poem he wrote that he said was known to “bring the house down” at the Baptist church every year.
“I’m not afraid of elephants, not yet wriggly snakes
But I’ll confess there’s something at which my courage quakes.
It’s not their hair, their smiles or their bubbling curls.
I’ll admit I’m afraid of girls.”
Adams broke into laughter reciting this poem decades later.
He participated in Boy Scouts, summer camp and football. The Boy Scouts would learn how to cook on a rock on camping trips. He remembers having his “butt handed to him” during multiple football games — and remembers the coach taking them to Dairy Queen, even after a loss. In the home, he worked in the print shop, on an old linotype machine, where Cunningham had also worked.
He has lots of good memories from the home once he settled down. He remembers “watermelon feasts,” when the watermelons got ripe, they would take a truckload of them to the pool to snack on while swimming.
“They gave us a life there,” he said. “You got to grow as a person.”
His father was not an involved figure in his life. Adams said his sixth grade teacher at Broad Street Elementary School wanted to adopt him, but his father would not let her. On the weekends, he said his teacher and her husband would let Adams stay at their mountain cabin with them near Salem. When his father found out that she was considering the adoption, he came and picked up Adams.
He remembers making $50 doing yard work for some of his neighbors in Salem, only for his father to take all his hard-earned money away from him.
The only visit he received over years at the home was from his Uncle Mars, he said. His uncle gave him a transistor radio during this visit, which he said “opened the world” for him. He remembers listening to Muhammad Ali, at the time Cassius Clay, fight after lights out, hoping the supervisor in the home wouldn’t catch him.
Adams’ family ended up moving to Edinburgh, Scotland, which he sees as an ironic change in his upbringing. Living with his stepmother, who was the head chef at the North British Hotel, he learned how to eat a “king course meal” and to “start from the outside and go inside when you have four forks.”
He still looks back on his years in the home as beneficial to his development. “I really believe society would be better off if we had more homes like that,” he said.
From home to workplace
Brenda Ferguson remembers doing a lot of cleaning at the home when she arrived with her younger sister in 1967. She was 12 years old.
The chores assigned to Ferguson were “nothing major” — stripping the beds on the weekends, dusting and mopping the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, and occasionally waxing the floors.
She was an athlete; track and basketball were her favorite sports, she said. When asked what her favorite part about being an athlete at the home was, she immediately mentioned Darr Graham, the coach who she said was a “big mentor” to her.
“I loved him to death,” she said. “I connected with him. … If I needed to talk to anybody, he was there for me.”
She remembers the staff taking the kids roller skating every Tuesday.
“We enjoyed it there,” she said, “but it wasn’t home.” Ferguson had lived with her grandmother until she died and then was “shifted from one relative to another.” She said she didn’t want to leave home, but her grandmother had arranged for her to go to Virginia Baptist once she died.
Similarly to Cunningham, Ferguson rebelled upon her arrival. She said she was an “A-B” student, but she said “I wasn’t doing anything.” She made 75 “F” grades that first year, she said.
Her teachers who “knew she could do the work,” coupled with other resources and support, turned her around from being an “F” student, she said.
She was adopted at 15 years old, and with that, moved to Europe. She later returned to Virginia Baptist and worked in the library. Ferguson now lives in Tennessee. She said she wishes the home was still like it was back then — “There are so many other kids out there that could use a home.”
The evolution of Virginia Baptist into HopeTree
Today, HopeTree serves children and families around Salem; among the services it offers are therapeutic foster care, an education academy, group homes and a developmental disabilities ministry.
The campus looks different at HopeTree than it looked when these five were growing up there. The administration building now looks like any other building, an unassuming, two-story brick building, not the “castle-like” building it once was with a Hogwarts-sized dining hall. The farmland has been adapted for other uses.
Some of the cottages on the hilltop have been torn down. Others have been renovated. Some sit empty, filling no immediate need. Some hold artifacts and memorabilia for the alumni group.
In June, the Salem City Council approved a rezoning that would allow for more types of development and apartment buildings on 62 acres of land that HopeTree is looking to sell. This process is being repeated with a new, but substantially similar, application by HopeTree after a lawsuit was filed by some Salem residents on the grounds that the initial rezoning hadn’t been handled properly. On Nov. 26, the council voted 3-2 to approve the new application. It’s set to have a second and final vote on Monday.
HopeTree, according to application documents, wishes to keep about 22 acres to continue its services.
The CEO of HopeTree Family Services, Jon Morris, said HopeTree is going to attempt to keep standing and transform its existing buildings, rather than tear them down.
Over the years, the facility changed and evolved with the times in response to changing ideas of childhood and social services — and still is evolving in conjunction with such new ideas today.
