ONONDAGA COUNTY

ORPHAN ASYLUM

ERECTED TO HONOR ITS DEAD

BY

CHRISTINA COLVIN

ONE OF ITS FOUNDERS.

1894.

In the Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, New York, philanthropist Christina Colvin commissioned sculptor Ralph Cook (1847 – 1912) to create a monument to honor those orphans of the asylum who had died.  According to the April 4, 1892 edition of the Syracuse Journal, Colvin’s “devotion to the Orphan Asylum has often stimulated others to follow her example. She labored for it in various directions … How large would be the pile of socks, stockings and mittens she knit till her lame, tired hands could knit no longer. She did good, as she had opportunity. Often stricken by sorrow, she strove in helping others to forget her own loneliness. Long connected with the Reformed church, whether she took the care and responsibility from less broad and experienced shoulders in her own social gatherings, greatly helping to ensure their success, or came into our homes with strong but tender hands and heartfelt sympathy in times of sickness and death, we all know we could trust dear “Aunt Tiny.”

According to the Smithsonian American Art Museums Art Inventories Catalog, the sculpture created by Cook depicts a “female figure holding a child in her left hand while comforting a toddler with her right.”  The irony of the monument featuring a mother with two children and dedicated to the orphans of the county, is that the children buried in this section of the cemetery did not have mothers.