Talitha Cumi Home

Bethel A.M.E. church, 2008 - Formerly Talitha Cumi home.



Like the original Home for Blind Babies, this was an institution that was unknown to me. The Talitha Cumi home was a residential facility and hospital for pregnant girls that moved from the South End to Forest Hills street. A picture of the facility can be seen at the Jamaica Plain Historical Society web site here. I can well imagine that once the facility was built, few in Jamaica Plain would have been aware of it. Set off at the edge of a residential district that still was not filled in, it was probably out of sight as well as out of mind. Still, if not of Jamaica Plain, it was certainly in Jamaica Plain, so it deserves a mention here.

You can see the location of the home on Forest Hills street at the bottom of this 1914 map.

Edit: I just (3/4/2008) added the contemporary picture above. The building is now used by the Bethel A.M.E. church.


Boston Daily Globe January 19, 1910


Girls Want A Show.

Dr Julia M. Plummer Tells of Talitha Cumi Home.

Haven for Unfortunate Young Women Planned at Jamaica Plain.


"We feel that now the Y.M.C.A. has gotten all it wants and that it is time for the girls to have a turn," said Dr Julia Morton Plummer to a meeting at the hotel Tullieries yesterday. Dr Plummer was pleading for gifts to enable the New England moral reform society to complete the erection of three buildings for the Talitha Cumi home at Jamaica Plain. This society is over 70 years old and has for many years carried on a hospital and home for unfortunate girls, most of whom have come to their unhappiness through no fault of their own and many of whom are under 16 years of age.

The society has now in hand $46,000, two houses on the corner of West Brookline st and Warren av in the South End and three acres of land facing Franklin park in Jamaica Plain. It is necessary that $54,000 shall be raised to erect the buildings desired for the better carrying on of the work.

One building is to be the receiving home, where the girls may enter two or three months before they become actual patients, the hospital building itself and the third building is to be fitted up for industrial training for the girls who are not fitted to become wage earners of any kind and where the weaker ones may be kept until their strength will allow them to be worth while to employers.

Dr Plummer was introduced by Arthur Perry, treasurer of the building fund, who paid a tribute to the work which the doctor has done in the last 20 or more years in giving her entire life to the work of the home, for many years as physician, secretary, speaker, house mother and almost everything else, and then, after severe illness compelled her to relinquish a portion of the work acting as superintendent and corresponding secretary.

Dr Plummer said the work of the home embraced not only the hospital work, and the educational work to which many people preferred to give their money, but it healed the broken hearts of helpless young women, who nowhere else in the state could find tender, sympathetic are in their time of awful need.

"In no hospital or institution supported by the state," said the doctor, "will the girl be taken until the actual hour when she becomes a patient. If she goes to Tewksbury she has absolutely nothing but the most degrading companionship, with no word or care or thought of uplift.

"She goes through her hospital care when the time comes in the barest and most meagre way. She goes forth at a time when she ceases to be a patient with a baby in her arms and with no provision for a place where she can earn the support of that little life for which she is now responsible. It rests absolutely with private charities to stand between these young girls and a dark future."