The Orphanage of Light and Hope
Early in the spring of 1902 the Sprunger family came from Bern, Indiana, to Henrietta. They bought four farms on Gore-Orphanage Rd. along the Vermilion River. Two of the farms were in Swift’s Hollow and two on the upland, about 500 acres of land.
Reverend Sprunger hoped to create a self-sustaining orphanage. He and his co-workers were devout Bible-believing Christian people. There were about one hundred and twenty children. Boys lived at the Hughes farm and girls at the Howard farm. They had seventy cows, one hundred hogs, one hundred sheep and lambs, and poultry. Mr. Sprunger has personally invested heavily in this. They had a chapel room in the boy’s schoolhouse. They owned a small printing press and printed their own school books.
Rev. Sprunger died shortly after the orphanage became well organized.
They became heavily indebted to a Vermilion Bank, so they sold most of the livestock and valuable machines before the bank foreclosed and had a public sale in 1916.
Pelham Hooker Blossom of Cleveland bought the Orphanage property, leased it to farmers for a period, then finally sold the land.
The Hughes House is all that remains of the Sprunger property. Part of the orphanage buildings burned and the rest were torn down. The house is to the left of the curve made by Gore-Orphanage Road as it bends and becomes Portmann Rd.
Transcribed by Lowell Dunlap