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Founded in Helena in 1909 by Rev. William Wesley Van Orsdel (Brother Van), as a boarding school, Intermountain is honored to celebrate our centennial in 2009.

Historical Articles: Into the Heart-life of Children | Women of Montana

Montana Woman Magazine
November 2008
Intermountain: Restoring Hope for Children
By Ellen Baumler, Montana Historical Society’s Interpretive Historian

Maxine McCaffery was born on a ranch in the Big Hole valley, the youngest of five children. In 1913 when Maxine was six, her mother, Cora, died after a lengthy illness. Bedridden for several years before her death, Cora knew her illness was terminal and realized that her husband, Charles, would not be able to properly care for the children. So she set aside money for each child and carefully chose a place where the siblings would receive a Protestant education and good care. Although Charles kept the children at the ranch for a year after Cora’s death, he finally took them to the Deaconess Preparatory School following her wishes.

The Helena-based school filled an important niche. It was the dream of Reverend William Wesley Van Orsdel, Montana’s beloved circuit-riding Methodist minister. “Brother Van” saw that children like the McCafferys needed a nurturing home when their parents—for a variety of reasons—could not provide it. The school was Brother Van’s inspiration, but for its first forty years, women managed and staffed the home, taught the children, tucked them into bed, and loved them. Methodist deaconesses initially undertook this work, laying the solid foundation upon which today’s nationally recognized facility rests.

Through a century of nurturing and change, Intermountain is the modern incarnation of the Deaconess Preparatory School. Today the facility offers nurturing, therapeutic environments for children under severe emotional distress. As Intermountain prepares to celebrate its centennial in 2009, its focus has evolved, but the real heart of its mission—restoring hope for children—remains little changed.

In the late nineteenth century, dedicated women of various Protestant denominations trained in nursing, teaching, and social work. These deaconesses were the Protestant equivalent of Roman Catholic sisterhoods. The Chicago Training School, the first for Methodist deaconesses in North America, opened in 1896. Dozens of Methodist hospitals across Montana utilized the skills of these trained deaconesses.

Brother Van observed that the deaconesses might provide the opportunity and the solution to his dream of founding a school for children. Roman Catholic sisters offered children good educations in communities throughout Montana, yet there was not a single school for Protestant youth in the entire Northwest. Brother Van asked Louise Stork to help in his campaign. Miss Stork came to Montana from the Chicago school in 1905 to help expand the Methodist hospital at Great Falls. In 1909, she accepted the challenge.

The two set their sights on the abandoned Wesleyan University campus, founded three miles out of town in the Helena Valley in 1890. Trolley lines had closed making the campus inaccessible to students and the university had relocated in town in 1898. Together Miss Stork and Brother Van convinced the Wesleyan board that the empty college was a “black eye” on Methodism. The board reluctantly gave them permission to use it for their school. Miss Stork and four other Chicago-trained deaconesses had much to do.

The building was uninhabitable. Arriving at twilight on a June evening, the women set up makeshift beds in one of the rooms, and by the light of old kerosene lamps, immediately set to work. By September, they had the derelict building furnished and homey. The Montana Deaconess Preparatory School opened with thirty day and boarding students. The building capacity, at sixty-five students, seemed ample at first but the school quickly grew. In 1911 enrollment was forty-six; in 1912 it was fifty-six, and by 1914, the school was beyond capacity at seventy-two.

Although women of the Methodist Deaconess Association managed the school under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church, it was an ecumenical venture with several of Helena’s Protestant churches represented on the school’s Board of Trustees. The first promotional literature described the school as non-sectarian and the only such Protestant school for boys and girls west of the Mississippi. “Protestantism,” the pamphlet’s introduction declared, “must care for her own!” Ministers of Helena’s Protestant churches took turns conducting Sunday services.

Miss Stork saw her work come to fruition with the school’s immediate success and retired in 1910. Roxana Beck—like her predecessor, a deaconess trained at Chicago—became principal. In 1913, Helen C. Piper, also a trained Chicago deaconess, joined the professional staff as assistant superintendent. Miss Piper was a native of Illinois, and when she arrived in the treeless, sun-baked Helena valley, she promised to stay only one year. But her work with the children so captivated her that she never left. Her widowed mother, Minnie, came to join her, taking over care of the “linen department.” Helen Piper was the school’s mainstay and pillar for forty-seven years.

“The Deac,” as it soon came to be known, accepted boarding and day students from ages five to fourteen. Monthly tuition was $20 and the well-rounded curriculum extended through the eighth grade. The school catered especially to rural boys and girls whose parents, for a variety of reasons—illness, separation, death of a spouse—were unable to care for their children. The school encouraged music and drama. Through the decades under Miss Piper’s supervision, the children staged plays, operettas and Christmas programs, and often performed at community events. Maxine McCaffery recalled that the children received candy on Wednesdays and fruit on the weekends. Teachers sometimes took the children to the local confectionery as a special treat and occasionally even took them home on weekends.
Miss Piper’s annual reports reveal the school’s care and concern for the children. In 1932 she wrote: We want to be a real home. I trust the time will never come when we will be known as an institution. While …there must be rules, yet we have made them such that they have not been a burden. It is our desire to have the children live a free, joyous life. We want at all times to radiate joy. That we have succeeded is shown by the testimony of many who, when they enter the building say, “How happy you feel when you enter this place.”

Children came to the Deac from all over the Northwest and Canada. By the 1920s, average enrollment was eighty students. In 1929, when Miss Piper became principal, the school accepted ninety-five students and refused seventy-six.

Locals perceived the Deac as a place for orphans and destitute children, which it was not exactly, but because of this, the community was always generous. It was true that many children came to the home who could not pay, and there were tragic stories of lonely children who needed comfort and love. Miss Piper described a father who brought his three little children to the home on a Christmas day during the Depression. He wept as he told them goodbye. But he wanted her to know he felt the joy of the home. “I am not crying because they are here,” he said, “but because I have to leave them. I am so glad I found this place.”

During the depression, 70 percent of the children at the Deac were charity cases. “Yet,” Miss Piper wrote, “we were able to pay our bills. Friends had slipped us tiny envelopes.” Donations and a bequest of $10,000 kept the school solvent. When summer came in 1935, thirty children had nowhere to go. Miss Piper always gave up her summers to these little ones, noting what a joy it was to bring a bit of sunshine into their lives.

Over the years Miss Piper saw many children grow into young adults. John was one of the most memorable. He was a very little boy when he first came to the Deac from Wenatchee, Washington. His mother had abandoned the family, and the father brought him to Helena. The first night he cried and cried and finally told the housemother that if the lady who greeted him at the door would see him, he would feel better. The housemother took him to Miss Piper’s room, and she rocked him until he was finally quiet and willingly went to bed.
John went home in the summers, and each year on his first night back at school it was the same. He had to visit Miss Piper before he could go to sleep. But when he entered seventh grade, on his first night back at school he did not show up at her door. When she questioned him at breakfast, John smiled and replied, “Oh, gee, Miss Piper. I’m too big now.” Miss Piper wrote, “My feelings were similar to a mother whose baby grows up.”

When critics pressured the Deac to send its students to public school, Miss Piper eloquently defended the private school. Deaconess students were often behind in their studies and in social development, and needed individual attention. Most of its students fell into these minorities, “and minorities are precious in a democratic plan of life….The social orphan,” she further explained, “stands just as much in need as the child whom death has robbed.”

Devastating earthquakes in October 1935 destroyed the old 1890 Wesleyan college building and severely damaged Van Orsdel Hall, just completed next door. Miss Piper and her staff quickly relocated many of the children in the late Dr. Napoleon Salvail’s abandoned hospital and placed others in private homes. During this time of extreme difficulty, the school’s future looked grim, but in 1937, the Deac providentially acquired Mills Hall, the former home of the Intermountain Union College on Eleventh Avenue (now the Department of Corrections). “They say it can’t be done,” Miss Piper wrote. “We say, ‘Here it is!’”

The Helen C. Piper Chapel, added to the campus in the late 1940s, recognized this dedicated educator’s long years of devotion to the children and the school. After Miss Piper retired in 1950, there were no more deaconesses and the school underwent a transition. Community needs changed and foster care became an option for many of the children the Deac formerly served.

In 1951, Luanne and Kathy Richter and their two older brothers, Lonnie and Ed, came to the Deac. Their mother could not hold a job and take care of them too, so she placed them at St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage. But when the Richters’ mother could not pay for their board, the Deac took them in. Luanne, then seven, remembers those years with nostalgia. “It’s a terrible thing to grow up feeling like you don’t belong anywhere,” Luanne recalled. “The beauty of the Deac was that everyone there was the same. The housemothers treated us equally. We all felt that we belonged. It was our home.” The Richter children were musically talented and all four of them took private lessons. Luanne sang in the choir and performed in school productions.

In 1954 the Richter children, caught in the transition when the school discontinued its academic curriculum, went to foster care. Remaining students at the Deac attended public school. House parents replaced the female-only staff and courts and public welfare agencies began referring troubled adolescents to the home. With this new focus, the name changed to Intermountain Deaconess Home for Children.

In 1971, Intermountain moved to its present cottage-style campus at 500 S. Lamborn and in-house educational services resumed. In 1982, professional counselors replaced house parents and services further evolved. Today, Intermountain is a nationally recognized non-profit organization providing early prevention, intervention and treatment for youth and families. Children in treatment learn to trust, to laugh, and to love.

Founders strove to comfort, nurture, and “enter into the heart-life of the children.” The services have changed, but Intermountain’s mission, “to heal through healthy relationships,” is not so very different. And some things have come full circle.

Maxine McCaffery, “Granny Max” to her loving family, indirectly left Intermountain an important legacy. Her grandson’s wife, Dana Holzer, today serves as its chaplain, tightly tying the threads Brother Van envisioned. Intermountain preserves its ecumenical spirit as a mission of the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Presbyterian Church, USA. The men and women of today’s Intermountain look forward to celebrating their centennial and providing another century of healing for children.

The second annual Calling All Angels, a spectacular fund-raiser for Intermountain’s services in the Flathead Valley on December 13, promises to be Kalispell’s most memorable event of 2008.

For more information, visit www.intermountain.org