A Brief History of Our House

We are proud of our beautiful old building and would like to share a bit of its history with you. In 1881, Mr. John Garver, a local hardware store merchant, purchased the land on which this building stands, and constructed this home for his family. At that time, the property was on the western rural outskirts of Des Moines.

In 1925, the Catholic Church purchased the badly neglected house as a home for abandoned or orphaned children. It was named “The Christ Child Home.” When it opened, the Bishop wrote to three doctors asking them to act as physicians for the home. “I hardly need to say your service will be for sweet charities sake,” was his plea. For ten years, Dominican Nuns from Koblenz, Germany, were in charge of what were known as “unfortunate babies.” These sisters, a day nurse and a night nurse, cared for the children in the home. Sometimes there were as many as 25 children living in The Christ Child Home, from newborns to five years of age. When the children reached their fifth birthday, they were placed in Catholic boarding homes if they had not been adopted.

A familiar sight along Grand Avenue was the nuns in black habits pulling sleds full of brightly wrapped children after a snowfall. In the summer, the nuns could be seen leading rowdy processions around the tree shaded lawn. A statue of the Christ child stood among the evergreens and was illuminated at Christmas time.

By 1965, there were social agencies to handle adoptions and the cost of maintaining the home had become prohibitive, so it was closed. All together it had sheltered 3,034 children, whose voices can still be heard along the corridors late at night if you listen very carefully.

Our law firm purchased the house in 1993 and has made a few changes. We have built an addition on in the back. In order to conform architecturally to the rest of the house we had the brick milled, matched and transported in from the same quarry as the brick in the original structure.

In 2004, we added a special commissioned artistic sculpture to the front lawn. The artist is Mr. James Ellwanger of Des Moines and the piece is entitled “Protecting Balance.”

We love “our old house” and it is a pleasure to come to work in it every day.