The Forgotten Orphans of Saint Helena: How a 19th-Century Experiment in New York Tried to Engineer the Perfect Citizen

By Charlotte Ellis, Historical Features Correspondent
New York, November 2025

When historian Dr. Amelia Rhodes opened the battered steamer trunk in a Manhattan archive basement last spring, she expected dust, perhaps moth-eaten ledgers — not the eyes of thirty pale children staring back from a faded photograph labeled “Saint Helena Orphanage, New York, 1888.”

“It was like they were waiting for me,” Rhodes recalls. “The faces were too vivid, too deliberate — and one boy in the back row was holding something that absolutely shouldn’t exist in that year.”

That discovery, at first dismissed as another oddity from the Victorian age of reform, would unravel into a shocking revelation about how America’s wealthiest families once sought to shape society from the shadows — by molding orphans into the citizens they wanted the nation to have.

The trunk, sealed since the 1920s, had been mislabeled among estate items donated from the Wexler family, an old Manhattan dynasty of bankers and philanthropists. Inside lay photo albums, correspondence, and a set of medical and behavioral reports stamped with the insignia of the Saint Helena Orphanage for Destitute Youths, a now-demolished institution that once stood on the edge of the Bowery.

The photos were unremarkable at first glance: rows of solemn, unsmiling children, typical of the era. But one image on page 17 stopped Rhodes cold.

“The children are standing in the courtyard — but one of them, a boy no older than ten, holds what looks like a notebook or thin device in his hand,” she says. “It’s not an object I can identify as belonging to 1888. And he’s smiling — not posed, not stiff, but aware.”

At first, Rhodes assumed it was a photographic illusion. But when she magnified the digitized image, she saw details impossible to ignore — the boy’s gaze, fixed directly on the camera, and a faint inscription on his collar tag: “Unit C – Experimental Class.”

Determined to learn more, Rhodes turned to the New York Historical Society’s archives, where she unearthed a collection of administrative records from the orphanage. The ledger entries for 1887–1889 listed 128 children by name — but 23 had annotations that read simply “special instruction – Class C.”

“What did Class C mean?” she wondered aloud. “And why were these particular children registered under a separate code?”

Digging deeper, she found a series of letters exchanged between Dr. Lionel Everett, the orphanage’s superintendent, and Henry Wexler, a prominent industrialist and one of Saint Helena’s principal donors.

Letter dated March 12, 1888:
“Our success with the current cohort has surpassed expectations. The children display remarkable aptitude in social reasoning and mechanical comprehension. It is vital that the sessions continue without interference from diocesan authorities.”

Rhodes recalls the chill that ran through her reading that sentence.
“This wasn’t the language of charity,” she says. “It was the language of experimentation.”

Over the following months, Rhodes pieced together a network of philanthropists, psychologists, and social reformers connected through the New York Society for Moral Improvement, a private organization funded by elite families such as the Wexlers, the Vanderbilts, and the Astors.

Founded ostensibly to promote education and uplift the poor, the Society had operated dozens of “training institutions” across the eastern United States — including Saint Helena.

Hidden within a 1889 annual report was a paragraph easily overlooked:

“The Saint Helena initiative continues to yield promising results in controlled environments, suggesting that moral and civic virtues can, indeed, be cultivated systematically through early intervention and structured conditioning.”

It was a startling statement — suggesting that the orphans of Saint Helena were subjects in an early form of behavioral and psychological conditioning.

The tone of the correspondence between Everett and Wexler grew increasingly confident — and disturbing. One memo outlined a curriculum divided into Cognitive Discipline, Emotional Regulation, and Obedience Response. Children, it seemed, were not simply being educated; they were being shaped.

“The key lies in repetition and reward,” wrote Dr. Everett in 1888.
“To extinguish selfish impulse and implant civic virtue, one must begin before the age of ten.”

Rhodes’s next discovery came from an unexpected source — an oral history recorded in the 1960s with Mary Donovan, who had been a nurse’s assistant at Saint Helena in its final years before closing in 1903.

The transcript, labeled simply Interview #54 – Donovan, M., had been gathering dust in Columbia University’s sociology archives.

“They kept the Class C children separate,” Donovan recalled.
“They were the quiet ones. Always writing things, always watching the others. The sisters said they were ‘special,’ but I never saw them play.”

Donovan’s testimony described eerie nocturnal routines — small groups of children awakened at odd hours, taken to the cellar classroom beneath the chapel, and returning silent and pale before dawn.
“I thought they were ill,” she said. “But Dr. Everett said they were being ‘prepared.’ For what, I never knew.”

The most explosive piece of evidence emerged six months into Rhodes’s research: a bound notebook tucked between architectural drawings in the Wexler trunk. It was Dr. Everett’s private diary.

Its entries, written between 1887 and 1889, revealed a man obsessed with the idea of scientifically engineering morality.

January 4, 1888:
“They learn faster than anticipated. Suggestibility increases when praise and isolation are alternated. Thomas (Unit C-3) demonstrates anticipatory reasoning — predicts caretaker actions with unsettling accuracy.”

February 16:
“We have begun the empathy drills. Observation through mirror sessions yields measurable change. Subject C-5 (Mary Sullivan) cried upon witnessing simulated harm, then comforted the others without instruction. The effect was profound.”

March 10:
“The benefactors demand results. I have promised proof that virtue can be taught as precisely as arithmetic. God forgive me, but they may be right.”

To Rhodes, this read less like a mad scientist’s journal and more like an early prototype for modern psychological conditioning — decades before Pavlov or Skinner.

“This was behavioral science before the field had a name,” she explains. “Except these weren’t volunteers — they were orphans.”

Not all within Saint Helena agreed with the experiment. Among the documents, Rhodes discovered three letters written by Sister Agnes Byrne, a young nun stationed at the orphanage during the critical years.

Her letters to the Archdiocese, never answered, provide a heartbreaking counterpoint to Everett’s cold rationality.

Letter to the Archbishop of New York, April 1888:
“Father, I beg you to intervene. The experiments they conduct under the guise of moral education are cruel beyond measure. The children are deprived of affection to observe their reactions. Some have ceased to speak altogether.”

June 1888:
“Last night, I found Thomas in the infirmary, staring at the wall. He said, ‘We are being rewritten.’ I do not know what that means, but his voice was not his own.”

By late 1889, Sister Agnes had been transferred to a distant parish. Shortly after her departure, all records of Class C were erased from the orphanage registry.

Rhodes’s research reached a turning point when she compared Saint Helena’s records with those of other institutions connected to the New York Society for Moral Improvement. Patterns emerged: similar “special instruction” classes, similar disappearances of records — and later, a remarkable coincidence.

“Several alumni from these orphanages grew up to become influential figures in early 20th-century reform movements,” Rhodes notes. “Teachers, doctors, even political organizers who all shared a commitment to social order, discipline, and civic virtue — exactly what Everett and Wexler intended.”

Her conclusion was chilling: Saint Helena wasn’t just a charitable experiment. It was a prototype for social engineering — a covert attempt by elite philanthropists to create a generation of obedient, morally upright citizens who would stabilize a rapidly industrializing nation.

A 1890 memorandum from the Society confirmed the scope:

“Phase III to begin in 1891. Graduates from Class C to be strategically placed within educational and civic institutions. Their conditioning ensures loyalty to order, diligence, and moral restraint. Disorder must be taught out of the populace.”

By early 1890, the project collapsed under its own weight. A series of newspaper exposés accused Saint Helena of “unorthodox instruction,” and a city health inspector’s report mentioned “psychological exhaustion among children.” The orphanage quietly closed in 1892; its building was demolished a decade later.

Dr. Everett disappeared. Wexler shifted his attention to overseas charities. The Society dissolved.

But the children — at least some of them — lived on.
Rhodes’s genealogical research traced seven surviving Class C children who were adopted into prominent families across the East Coast. One became a pioneering social worker. Another founded a teacher-training college. Yet another, astonishingly, advised government committees on public morality in the 1920s.

“It’s as if they had been programmed to continue the mission,” Rhodes says softly. “To spread the ideal of controlled virtue through society.”

Her research, soon to be published in The Journal of American History, paints a portrait both inspiring and terrifying — the birth of modern social science through the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable.

Today, the site of Saint Helena Orphanage is a condominium tower. But beneath its polished lobby, foundations of the old chapel remain sealed. Rhodes hopes to excavate them next spring.

She stands by the photograph — the one that started it all — displayed now in the New York Historical Society’s special exhibition “Children of the Experiment.” The boy’s faint smile still unsettles her.

“I used to think he looked out of place,” she says. “Now I think he was the only one who understood what was happening.”

Visitors often stop, stare, and whisper. Some swear the boy’s eyes follow them across the room.

In her forthcoming book, The Orphan Code, Rhodes argues that the Saint Helena experiment foreshadowed the tensions that still define American philanthropy today — between altruism and control, progress and manipulation.

“Every age tries to engineer its citizens,” she writes. “Saint Helena was merely the first to do it with such precision — and such secrecy.”

Dr. Everett’s final diary entry, dated December 30, 1889, still haunts her.

“The experiment succeeds. The children obey, not from fear, but from conviction. We have given them purpose — perhaps more than nature ever intended.”