While waiting for the train I was furnished with a sofa by the kind matron who kept the ladies' waiting-room. I was met at the Pittsburg depot with passes, and conducted to the waiting-room for a few moments, when the young man came to assist me on the right car. By this time my fever ran high, but higher still on reaching Cleveland, and finding that all had gone on to Adrian. Here tickets to Adrian were waiting for me.
I met brother J. Berry at Adrian depot, who informed me that all were cared for. I left all with the Lord and the good people of Adrian, who knew nothing of my trying experiences.
My children were urgent to send for the doctor at once. I insisted on my water treatment, but promised to comply with their request if not materially better in twelve hours. A few days of rest and quiet restored my health.
Although Adrian was a little alarmed at this new experience of army stampedes, yet in due time places were found for all to work, and eventually many of them became owners of their own homes.
The children of soldiers and other homeless waifs, needed attention, and I found more than a dozen in our Orphans' Home without a shirt for a change. But sister Annie Berry donated forty yards of heavy sheeting, and within two weeks we had a hundred yards made up into substantial garments for these little homeless ones. My health being still too poor for hard work, I spent a few weeks with my son, Joseph B. Haviland, at Acme, Grand Traverse County.
On my return home, I found our commission had concluded to close the asylum work, and expend its means in supporting schools in the South. They had sold the West Hall, and it had been removed to Tecumseh, and they were about to sell the team and other property. I now stated the motive I had when I gave the deed with a proviso, and said that removing the building was a wrong step for our commission to take, in view of the proviso. I met the commission in Detroit, and laid before them my object, and my desire to make it a State asylum, for the children of soldiers and all others who were in our county poor-houses, that were mere nurseries for the prison. I had inquired of superintendents of penitentiaries, how many of the convicts had been left orphans in childhood; and the average in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and our Michigan State Prison was more than three-fourths. Emma A. Hall, matron of the female prisoners in the Detroit house of correction, informed me that every girl and woman under her care had been left an orphan in childhood. In view of this record, and of there being a greater number of that class since the war than ever before, I had felt the necessity for this asylum.
George Duffield, D. D., the president of our commission, replied: "We know not but this check is of the Lord, for we are finding it hard work to secure homes for the forty children now in the Home who are under ten years of age." And he moved that a month be allowed me to make satisfactory arrangements according to my design. While I was endeavoring to secure ten-dollar subscriptions to effect this result, J. R. Shipherd, secretary, of the Western Division American Missionary Association, sent an agent to purchase the asylum and continue it in its present form. He stated the American Missionary Association could not take it with the proviso, but would pay me two hundred and fifty dollars of the five hundred dollars I had agreed to deduct out of the two thousand dollars purchase money, if I should relinquish the proviso. I feared the result, thinking the enterprise might be only an experiment, and might close at some future period, leaving these children a public burden. But J. R. Shipherd pledged his word that no child of whom the American Missionary Association should take control should become a public burden, and would further agree to expend on the building and grounds, at least from three thousand to five thousand dollars within a year and a half or two years at longest.
From the confidence I had in the association I yielded, though reluctantly. The agent desired me to take charge of the asylum as matron, ten days or two weeks, as Mr. Shipherd could secure a matron from Vicksburg, Mississippi, in that time. I agreed to do this free of charge. Mrs. Edgerton, whom se engaged as matron, arrived in four weeks.
It was now late in October, and my Winter cough began to trouble me. This the Southern Winters had melted away during three Winters past, and I concluded to resign my agency in our State Freedmen's Aid Commission and work under the auspices of American Missionary Association of the middle division. I secured transportation from General O. O. Howard to Atlanta, Georgia, and again left my dear ones at home for that field. I spent a few days with my dear friends, Levi and Catharine Coffin, at Cincinnati. As the secretary, brother Cravath, was on an investigating tour in the South, Levi Coffin proposed that I should go to work over the river, in Covington and Newport, Kentucky, as there were a few thousand freedmen congregated in those towns. He introduced me to a lieutenant, in whose charge the freedmen's department was left, who took me to a number of barracks, where the sick and suffering were occupying bunks with a bed sack that had, when possible, been filled with hay, leaves, or husks.
One poor woman had nothing in her sack, and that was all she had for her bed, aside from an old condemned blanket. She was suffering intensely with rheumatism. Her limbs and hands were all drawn out of shape, thus disabling her from dressing herself. I purchased some hay immediately and had her moved so as to have her bed-sack filled, and then furnished her with a warm quilt. I procured quantity of thick red flannel and made her a long-sleeved garment to reach over her feet, and made it before I slept. The next morning I took it to her and saw it on her. The poor woman could say nothing for weeping, but after commanding her feelings, she said, "This is more than I deserve. All the sufferin' I's had all the year is nothin' compared to the sufferin' of my Jesus for poor me." The colored woman who had the care of her said she never had seen such patience in all her life. The next day I took her another flannel garment, and relieved many others during the month I spent in this field.