On an overcast Friday afternoon in mid-October, as rain was spreading into Cecil County, I paused on the top of “Sister’s Hill” in North Chesapeake City, contemplating the history of an orphanage that for much of the 20th century took care of dependent children. Here is what I have been able to dig up thus far, but I plan to look more deeply into the institution’s history as there isn’t much readily available written material.
The Sisters of the Order of St. Basil the Great (O.S.B.M), a Ukrainian Greek Catholic order, established a convent in the United States in 1911 after the Rev. Bishop Soter Ortynsky, O.S.B.M., the Bishop of the Diocese, requested them. The European nuns arrived in Philadelphia to carry on their mission of teaching and caring for dependent children.
Soon after, the sisters established an orphanage on a hilltop on a farm on the northern edge of Chesapeake City. Ukrainians of the Delaware Valley,” an Arcadia Book by Alexander Lushnycky, has a photo of the original group of children at Chesapeake City, snapped during the summer of 1914. In the early days, according to Lushnycky, only preschool children lived there and in the summer boys from the Philadelphia home spent the farming season in Cecil County, working and learning the trade.
The St. Basil Orphanage, alongside the C & D Canal, cared for children between one and six years old, and in 1933, according to the Census Bureau, there were six youngsters on the farm. The Philadelphia home had seventy children between the ages of four and sixteen, according to the same source.
Today the property is vacant, the last of the aging sisters having closed up the institution. I remember two elderly nuns still living there in the late 1970s.
More photos on the Facebook page for Cecil County History
