The Gore Orphanage Legend: How the Journal Added Fuel to the Fire

Like many Baby Boomers growing up in Lorain County in the 1960s and 70s, I had heard the story about Gore Orphanage – how it had mysteriously burned down long ago, killing all the children, and how their ghosts now haunted the ruins of the building out on its namesake road south of Vermilion.

Where did I first hear about the legend? I'm not sure. It was one of those things that most kids seemed to have some awareness of, either through an older sibling or friend.

But there's one source that I believe greatly contributed to the popularity of the spooky story in the 1960s, saving it from obscurity and (for good or bad) planting the seeds of the full-blown phenomena it would become decades later.

And that source was the Lorain Journal.

It was in the late 1960s that locally there was an increased interest in the Gore Orphanage legend. Perhaps the reminiscing of elderly township residents (who were old enough to remember that there had been an actual orphanage, and that the nearby "haunted" Joseph Swift house had really burned down), had stirred the imagination of listeners. They wanted to know more about this orphanage and turned to the Journal for help.

Thus they wrote to the Journal's "Hot Line" feature, which answered a variety of questions. Here's a Gore Orphanage question that ran in the paper on June 3, 1967.

Here's another one, from July 16, 1968.

The Journal must have realized that interest in Gore Orphanage was pretty high – so it had Staff Writer Jeff Hammill write a full blown article (below) on it. The excellent piece ran in the Journal on August 8, 1968. Hammill even interviews a man who was alive when the real orphanage was in operation.

The Legend of Gore Orphanage

By JEFF HAMMILL

Staff Writer

HENRIETTA – Was there ever a place called Gore Orphanage? Where was it? Was it really destroyed by fire with many children being burned to death?

These are some of the questions being asked by people in Lorain County. For some reason which nobody has been able to explain, there has been an upsurge in interest over this bit of local history.

George Metcalf, Director of the Lorain County Historical Society Museum, said he has been receiving many requests for information about the orphanage.

DESPITE the fact that the entire history of the place is in this century, little is known about it and what is known is confused depending on the source of information. No records of the orphanage were kept.

The orphanage was begun in 1902 by Reverend John Sprunger, a German Lutheran minister and his associates who had come here from Bern, Ind. They had had an orphanage there but it burned down.

In Lorain County it was called the Orphanage of Light and Hope. The site consisted of about 500 acres.

According to Harold Swanson, North Ridge Road, Vermilion, who lived there from 1904-08, the land was made up of four farms formerly owned by Nicklaus Wilbur, Leveret Denman, Joseph Howard and John Hughes.

SWANSON remembers Sprunger as a kind-hearted man who had every good intention of making the place a success.

“However, he was away a lot and couldn’t devote enough time to the children. He hired overseers to manage the orphanage.

“Some of these men and women were kind and good like Rev. Sprunger, but there were some who were terrible. One of these men was named John Strauss.

“HE WAS very brutal. He whipped the children for very little things they would do wrong,” Swanson remembers.

He said that finally after almost killing a boy, Sprunger realized what was happening and released him.

Swanson said that, despite Sprunger’s goodness, he would rather spend four years in the state penitentiary than in that orphanage.

The homes, there was a boys’ home and a girls’ home, were two houses that had been standing on the previous farms. They were about a half-mile apart.

There are varying reports on the location of the orphanage. Metcalf located the place on a map about halfway between the present SR 113 and Portman Road on Gore Orphanage Road.

However, Swanson said that the boys’ home was located on the spot where a home now stands at the corner of Portman Road and Gore Orphanage Road. He said the girls’ home was down Portman Road to the east.

THE ORPHANAGE survived a number of years until Sprunger died in 1914. Then two years later, the mortgage was foreclosed by a Vermilion bank.

The children were moved to various homes in Cleveland.

The story that the girls’ home burned down is true, but once again stories about it differ.

Metcalf reports that the house burnt sometime in the ‘20s after it had been vacated. But, Swanson said that it burnt down around 1912 while it was still occupied. In either case, both men agree that no deaths were caused by the fire.

The boys’ home was torn down after the orphanage was vacated and a house was built on that spot. Some of the timbers from the old house were used in the new one.

The common belief that the area is haunted by the spirits of dead children stems from a separate story, that of the Swift Hollow House.

Joseph Swift, a former Connecticut soldier during the War of 1812, came to ’New Connecticut,’ a parcel of land set aside in Ohio for war veterans.

He was given 150 acres by the federal government on the Vermilion River and added to it. His farm prospered and by 1840 he was wealthy enough to build a house.

He engaged Oziah Long, an Elyria judge, to build a “Greek Revival” style house. The home when completed had columns, French windows, fourteen rooms and six fireplaces.

In 1865, Rosedale, as it was called, was sold. The Nicklaus Wilbur family bought the house and lived there a number of years.

BEING spiritualists, these people often claimed to have been able to raise the spirits of some children who had been buried along the river. This led to the belief that the home was haunted.

Eventually, the home was vacated and finally in 1923, it burned to the ground.

Because the Swift House was located at the bottom of the hill that the orphanage that the orphanage was later to be built on, the stories of the two places mixed, resulting in the rumors of ghosts and children screaming.

One final rumor that needs to be cleared up is how the word ‘gore’ became included with the orphanage. 

According to Metcalf, the “gore” was a strip of land between the originally surveyed Lorain County line and the lines of Erie and Huron Counties.

The discrepancy arose because of a fault in the early surveying of the Western Reserve.

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Although Hammill’s article was very thorough and should have put the Gore Orphanage legend to rest, interest in the story may have been kindled even more. Here's another “Hot Line” clipping from October 28, 1970. 

I like this "Hot Line" entry because it's a great capsule history of the orphanage and the Swift house, and offers the best and simplest explanation of the creation of the Gore Orphanage legend. It notes, "It is the belief of those who know the stories of the two places, that through the years the facts have become mixed." 

(That makes much more sense than the much-repeated theory that the Gore Orphanage legend owes its inspiration to the tragic Collinwood school fire of 1908, and that somehow the school fire story in which 172 children died was 'relocated' to Vermilion. What teenagers in the 1960s could remember a fire that took place in 1908, more than fifty miles away, and perhaps twenty years before their parents were even born?)

Anyway, despite the Journal's attempt to clarify the legend of Gore Orphanage, the story took on a life of its own, with the result that we are still taking about it decades later. 

And with its continued exposure in books, on websites and even as the subject of a movie a few years ago, Gore Orphanage will very likely continue to capture the imagination of young and old.

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As part of the preparation for this post, I paid my annual visit to the ruins of the Joseph Swift mansion on Gore Orphanage Road this past gloomy Sunday afternoon. I was the only one there, except for (appropriately enough) a black cat that was lurking about the site.

Sadly, the graffiti-covered remaining gate post has seen better days.

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While doing this blog for ten years, I’ve written about Gore Orphanage several times. I did a multi-part series on it here. I also wrote about how the 1923 Swift House fire was covered by the Elyria Chronicle here, and by a Mansfield newspaper here. I featured an article about a visit to the Swift House ruins in 1948 here, and paid a visit to the site with my camera here in 2011.