Detroit Social History Archives - You Don't Know How Lucky You Are

photo of six nurses and six infants, Crittenton General Hospital

A photo taken at Crittenton General Hospital in 1965 shows young infants in the care of nurses (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Detroit Public Library collection). Most infants born here were placed for adoption.

This week I read a wonderful photo history book on the hospitals, orphanages, and mental health facilities that were built and operated in Detroit and the surrounding area from the 1800s through the late 1900s. The slim tome, called Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers, by Patricia Ibbotson, is a great piece of storytelling. It shows how our society, in one major metropolitan area, cared for the sick, the infirmed, and the needy.

Ibbotson notes, “All of the hospitals, as well as homes for the aged and orphans, evolved from the poorhouse system.” She also notes most were founded by religious orders. Orphanages stand out for me because I am by historic reckoning a child placed in institutional care: in my case, I was given up for adoption and put into foster care for more than five weeks, making me a bastard, orphan, and foster kid all at once.

Patricia Ibbotson’s 2004 photo history book, Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers.

Ibbotson’s book documents nearly a half-dozen orphan facilities, describing the “illegitimately born” and discarded infants as “foundlings,” and their shamed mothers as women who had “fallen by the way.” In the United States, society viewed both groups as outsiders and, like most of Europe, treated them poorly, if not lethally well into the 20^th century.

According to Ibbotson’s research, Detroit had more than a half-dozen orphanages for homes for “unfortunate ones”— meaning the discarded infants—before 1900. Detroit’s long history of dealing with foundlings or so-called illegitimate babies resembled approaches used in other major cities, like New York City and its New York Foundling Hospital. The treatment or maltreatment of these infants left at these facilities in big cities helped spur the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and reforms to address well-documented abuses of discarded infants in the early 1900s. That organization played a key reformer role making adoption a safer system in the United States, which personally impacted my life after I was born.

Detroit, a city of fallen women and foundlings

A shot from 1912 of the Detroit Woman’s Hospital and Foundlings Home shows some of the many illegitimately born babies in its care (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Wayne State University collection).

Like New York City, Detroit was home to a large hospital dedicated to women and their “foundling” kids called the Detroit Woman’s and Foundling Home, which opened in 1869, created by a religious order to care for these socially scorned outcasts. It later became Hutzel Women’s Hospital.

Detroit also had multiple Florence Crittenton maternity homes and hospitals, which first opened in 1897 and later in grander fashion with opening of the Crittenton General Hospital in 1929, north of downtown. There were five homes and hospital/homes in all. Crittenton General Hospital, with three wings and dormitory facilities that also housed single pregnant mothers, became a future epicenter of adoption promotion in Michigan in the boom adoption years after World War II.

My life story began there, and that story was hidden from me for decades until I untangled the mystery, found my birth records, and put together the pieces of a tale showing how infants like me were part of a national system that separated millions of families in every state and territory. I recount this complex, national story in my newly released memoir, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are (purchase here).

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit is shown in a photo, taken shortly after its opening in 1929. I was born and relinquished into adoption here.

I requested Ibbotson’s book through my local library, hoping to find an image of the maternity hospital where I was born and then given up for adoption. That facility, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit, was one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals—it had 115 dormitory beds and two wings devoted to maternity care, according to Crittenton records. The Florence Crittenton Association of American and National Florence Crittenton Mission, which ran it and dozens of similar homes and hospitals for single pregnant women, promoted adoption in the three decades after World War II. I describe the significance of the hospital in my memoir and study of the American adoption system and experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.

A picture and its meaning

The picture included in Ibbotson’s book of Crittenton General Hospital could not have been more meaningful. It is a shot reportedly taken in 1965, the year of my birth, in front of the hospital. It shows six nurses in white outfits, each holding very young infants, all presumably being future adoptees. The cut line described the facility as a place for “’unfortunate women and girls’ and their babies.”

That same shot shown above, taken of Crittenton General Hospital in 1965, shows likely future adoptees in the care of nurses, though not every child born here was relinquished. Note, the cut line information has some inaccuracies from the source (photo courtesy of Patricia Ibbotson’s Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers and the Detroit Public Library collection).

On my computer, I zoomed in on the faces, wondering if I am in the half-dozen infants in the shot. I would have big ears, and I did not see that in two of the faces that are visible. The chances are perhaps one in several hundred I could have been captured in this unknown still, that is with the historical collection at the Detroit Public Library.

Unfortunately the picture and Ibbotson failed, like nearly every official source I have consulted, to even mention the word adoption, despite the hospital’s central role in that institution for the entire state and region.

My efforts to find the number of relinquished babies all failed, which I describe in my book in more detail. However, I peg the number of relinquished number of infants from Crittenton General at well over 20,000, mostly in the decades after the war, til the time of the hospital’s closing in 1974. It was torn down in 1975.

Based on all records I’ve found and my own original birth certificate, the cut line for this picture listed the wrong address for the photo as East Elizabeth Street, which is the address for the former Florence Crittenton Hospital, near downtown Detroit. Crittenton General Hospital was located at 1554 Tuxedo Street. Also the date of the hospital’s closure, according to the Detroit Free Press and other sources I consulted for my book, is 1974. The cut line lists 1976.

For additional information on the history of the National Florence Crittenton Mission, I can recommend a couple of sources:

Kunzel, Regina. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Wilson, Otto, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission. Fifty Years Work With Girls, 1883–1933: A Story of the Florence Crittenton Homes. Alexandria: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933.

(Author note: Since first publishing this article in July 2017, I have updated my research on Crittenton General Hospital, my birthplace. See my essay Crittenton General Hospital’s Forgotten Legacy Serving Single Mothers and Promoting Adoption in Michigan, published in March 2019.)

One of the unexpected outcomes of the American adoption experience is how the stigma of illegitimacy and out-of-wedlock pregnancy created a virtual cloak of invisibility around the birth of adoptees and their presence in the general population. That shame and stain of illegitimacy lives on in the form of laws that discriminate against adoptees who are denied the human right to their birth records and equal treatment under the law.

Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit is shown on Jan. 24, 1974, in this photo from the Detroit Free Press, two months before its closure. I was born here, as were thousands of other babies who were placed for adoption. (Click on the photo to see a larger image.)

I was born at Detroit’s Crittenton General Hospital, one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals that served unwed mothers and ultimately where thousands of infants were relinquished into the adoption system. The facility opened at Tuxedo and Woodrow Wilson in 1929, at a time when Crittenton homes and hospitals served the needs of “problem girls” and gave them a place to give birth and bond and stay with their children.

By the late 1940s, the Florence Crittenton Mission, later Florence Crittenton Association of America, had transformed its maternity homes and hospitals into temporary residences for thousands of single moms, who gave up their children at these facilities across the country. The infants today sometimes call themselves Crittenton babies, and I am one of an uncounted group who today still face legal discrimination accessing their birth records.

The photo seen here was taken on Jan. 24, 1974, two months before the hospital closed permanently on March 22, 1974. The building was demolished a year later. It closed due to financial strains, the decline of adoptions, and the gradual economic decay of Detroit.The story in the Detroit Free Press that accompanied this photo that I bought failed to mention the hospital’s historic role serving unwed mothers and then relinquishing those infants to new families.

The story from Jan. 24, 1974, in the Detroit Free Press, makes no mention of the hospital’s pivotal role delivering thousands of infants like me for adoption. (Click on the image to see a larger picture of the text copy.)

I was one of those infants, born about a decade before this picture. This journalistic oversight was not accidental—it fits into a larger pattern of hiding adoption from the public and erasing the story of adoptees from American history.

In 1967, the Crittenton General Hospital opened a new facility in Rochester, Michigan, in the suburbs, and became a general hospital that did not serve single birth moms and their children like all previous Crittenton missions and maternity homes. The two operated under the same names, but only the Rochester facility remains, still bearing the Crittenton name. Nationally, it is a name tied forever to the service of single, pregnant women, and later adoption.

Today, the Crittenton Hospital Medical Center in Rochester also has whitewashed its past and does not acknowledge who it once served, how that hospital helped to hide illegitimacy from the public, and its pivotal role transferring babies from a birth mothers to adoptive parents during the boom adoption years after World War II, through 1975.

The stigma surrounding illegitimacy drove the institution of U.S. adoption in the decades after the war and helped turn it into one of the largest social engineering experiments ever in U.S. history. That stigma is deeply woven into how state laws impact birth parents and adoptees today.

The new hospital in Rochester claims, after many efforts to contact its communications team in 2016, that it has no records of the number of adoptee births at the Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit—its predecessor. The hospital spokesperson did not return multiple calls and repeated emails for interviews and records. The only two documents the hospital shared were photocopies of short institutional histories, which did not outline the hospital’s important historic role as way station for birth mothers and adoptees. The summary documents did not offer a count of patients served or babies delivered by single mothers.

There are no records of the number of adoptee births kept by the National Crittenton Foundation, the mission’s successor group now located in Portland, Oregon. The official repository of all National Florence Crittenton Mission records, at the University of Minnesota Library, also did not have any documents that showed how many babies were born in Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit or in the multiple maternity homes in the city that opened first in 1900.

From a public health standpoint, it is practically scandalous that we still, to this day, have no accurate record of the number of adoptees who were relinquished in the United States. The U.S. Census in its last two counts failed to account for all adoptees in the way it counted adoptees and foster children, which missed entire generations of adults like me. The lack of data ultimately undercounts adoptees, and thus undermines their efforts to restore adoptees’ rights to receive copies of their original birth records in most states, where they are denied access unlike all non-adoptees.