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Ethel Harpst
In the early 1900s, a group of girls from The Rebecca McClensky
Home, an educational facility, came to live in Cedartown.
They moved into a two story house on Second Street in the
Goodyear Mill Village and opened a school for the many mill
workers and their children, most of whom could not read or
write. They also conducted religious services and visited
the sick. In 1913 The Women’s Home Mission Society of
the Methodist Church learned of the work being done and the
great needs of children and families in this county, so they
established The McCarty Settlement House at that location.
The work continued to consist of night school, church services,
and caring for the sick.
In 1914 the national Women’s Home Mission Society assigned
Ethel Harpst to come to Cedartown. Miss Harpst worked for 10 years with
the McCarty Settlement House until in 1924 she established the Ethel
Harpst Home.
Ethel Harpst was born in Ohio on October 27, 1883 and her
family moved to Piedmont, Alabama when she was a child. She
was educated at the John H. Snead Seminary in Boaz, Alabama,
then attended a training school in Cincinnati, Ohio and completed
her post graduate work in the Social Services in Washington,
D.C.
Miss Harpst cared for the sick and taught night school for
both children and adults. She helped establish a clinic where
typhoid fever and tuberculosis patients were treated and,
later, assisted in a day nursery developed by the Methodist
Missionary Society and financed by the Cotton Export Company
of Cedartown. Living conditions were hard during those days;
a growing number of children needed help for one reason or
another. The women of Cedartown organized and opened a cottage
for girls, called "The Sunshine Cottage." It was
here that Ethel Harpst began her work as a “mother”
for children and young people who needed a home, usually because
their own families were too sick or too poor to care for them.
Many had lost their parents to typhoid fever or their mothers
in childbirth. Before long, a larger building was needed to
accommodate the growing number of children needing a home.
In 1924 Mr. James Walker donated the Dr. William Bradford
Home in Cedartown to provide more space. The new location
was East of Cedartown on a hill called Bradford Heights. This
was the beginning of the Ethel Harpst Home in its present
location.
Eventually even more buildings to house the growing number
of homeless children were needed. From the wealthy Pfeiffer
family in New York, Ms. Harpst secured a sizeable donation
with which James Hall, the first building constructed, was
built in 1927. She thought this building would be big enough
to house many needy children for years to come.
As the Depression deepened and illness took the lives of many,
James Hall with all its three floors was filled beyond capacity.
Other buildings followed on the Harpst campus — still
with funds provided by various members of the Pfeiffer Family
— the Merner Dining Hall and the Pfeiffer Hall in 1933,
Noble Hall and the Superintendent’s Home in 1939, and
the Daniel Merner Chapel in 1942. The Home was incorporated
in November 1942 under the National Women’s Division
of the United Methodist Church. Ethel Harpst remained superintendent
of the home which bore her name until she retired in August
1951. She remained a beloved figure in the Cedartown community
and far beyond until her death on January 12, 1967. The Ethel
Harpst Home continued as a home for children for several years. As
the years went by, more and more children came from broken
or single-parent homes, bringing with them more emotional
problems and troubled behavior. By the 1970’s staff
who were working in the Ethel Harpst Home realized most of
the children needed more than simply love, food, and shelter;
they needed the assistance of personnel trained to help with
more troubled emotions and behaviors. In 1984, the Sarah Murphy
and Ethel Harpst Homes merged to become Murphy-Harpst Children
and Family Services. Work was in progress prior to the merger
that would enable the Homes to provide the more troubled children
and youth with the proper treatment services, including psychological
and psychiatric care. In 1987, Murphy-Harpst became one of
the first organizations licensed by the Georgia Department
of Human Resources to provide residential treatment.Today
the Ethel Harpst campus provides residential treatment, therapeutic
foster care, an equine therapy program, and a special education
school.
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