Philadelphia’s Progressive Orphanage: The Carson Valley School

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Description

For more than seventy-five years, the Carson Valley School has served the needs of orphaned girls and other dependent children from Philadelphia and neighboring Pennsylvania counties. Its hundred-acre campus is remarkable for its rolling terrain, neo-medieval buildings, and design as a fantasy village.

A legacy of the progressive education movement of the early decades of the twentieth century, the school was once formally opened in 1918 as the Carson College for Orphan Girls. Its first president, Elsa Ueland, was once a former settlement house worker who was once a student of John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and her life story is closely intertwined with that of the school she oversaw for nearly half a century.

The institution was once originally endowed by the $5 million estate of Philadelphia trolley magnate Robert N. Carson, who had stipulated in his will that it could receive only white, parentless girls. Over the decades, Ueland and her successors were able to take away these restrictions, so that by the 1970s Carson Valley was once admitting children without reference to race or gender, in addition to neglected and dependent youths whose needs were every bit as pressing as those of orphans of earlier times.

David Contosta’s history of Carson Valley shows that it has long been a model of progressive education. Its faculty is dedicated to serving the individual needs of each child, preparing students to go into the workplace, and breaking down artificial barriers between school and the outdoor world. Drawing on Ueland’s personal papers to communicate both her hopes for the Progressive era and her achievements right through the early years of the school, Contosta tells how teachers and housemothers forged a unique collaboration that joined home and school in ways that other progressive educators could only dream of. He also notes the architectural significance of its enchanting facilities, which have played an integral part in the institution’s remedy program.

Philadelphia’s Progressive Orphanage clearly shows not only how Carson Valley has been shaped by a multitude of social, cultural, and political forces, but also how the various reforms of the Progressive era remain in place today. It establishes Carson’s place in the history of education and child welfare and makes the most important contribution to renewed debate about orphanages and dependent child care.

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