GREEN BAY – “Bearing its massive tower toward the heavens, a monument to the fidelity of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows of Wisconsin to their pledge to provide for the widows and orphans of deceased brothers, the $30,000 Widows and Orphans Home stands on Astor Heights overlooking this city, complete and ready to receive those for whom it was created,” the Green Bay Weekly Gazette stated in January 1891.
“The heart of every Odd Fellow of Wisconsin swells with pride at the work that has been successfully accomplished and the voices of those widows and mothers who will be shielded and provided with a comfortable home in which to spend their declining years and rear their children.”
The Green Bay Odd Fellow Home was just the 16th institution to be developed by the group since the first Odd Fellows order was formed in the U.S. in Baltimore in 1819 with a mission “to render assistance to every brother, in sickness of distress.”
The first Wisconsin Odd Fellow Lodge was established in 1835 when the state was still part of the Iowa Territory.
In 1889, a Wisconsin Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows committee began investigating the establishment of a home for the aging, widowed and orphaned children of its members in Green Bay.
One year later, land near the Fox River was purchased with an existing facility present.
A statuesque building was constructed there and dedicated on Jan. 23, 1891, on what became 822 Grignon St., Green Bay.
During the dedication, Mayor James H. Elmore, Green Bay’s 26th mayor, spoke of its mission.
“We all know that among primitive nations, woman is but a slave and that the progress of her status in the world has been slow, that it is not only now, that it can be fairly said that among civilized nations woman is the admitted equal companion of man,” Elmore said.
“Therefore, the establishment of an Odd Fellows Woman’s Home, although its benefits are to be made to extend to children and indigent males, means something more than the establishment of an ordinary charitable or benevolent institution. It is a departure from the usual methods of dispensing charity, even in this great country of charities.”
Throughout the following decades, the facility provided a home and education for orphans and nursing services to its aging members.
Many of those passing at the facility were buried on a plot owned by the Odd Fellow Lodge at Woodlawn Cemetery in Green Bay.
In 1966, the facility was licensed as a skilled care facility and opened to the public.
In the summer of 1975, the Brown County Health Planning Council approved the allocation of $950,000 to replace the aging facility with a new structure on the same property.
The new facility remains at the adjacent location at 1229 S. Jackson St., Green Bay.
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