Carrie Steele Logan Dies: Founder of Oldest Black Orphanage

She wrote her autobiography and sold every copy herself, just to raise enough money to build a home for the children nobody wanted. Carrie Steele Logan, a formerly enslaved woman who worked as a steward at the Atlanta train station, started gathering abandoned Black children in the 1870s, tucking them into her own home before she had anything better. The Carrie Steele Orphan Home opened in 1888. It's still operating today, now called the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home, over 130 years of children, all because one woman refused to walk past a problem. Born around 1829, Steele Logan's early life was shaped by the institution of slavery, though the specific details of her bondage and emancipation remain unclear in the historical record. After the Civil War, she worked at Atlanta's Union Station, where she witnessed abandoned children, many of them orphaned or left behind by parents who could not afford to care for them during Reconstruction's economic devastation. She began taking these children into her own home, feeding and clothing them from her wages. To fund a proper orphanage, she wrote and self-published an autobiography, personally selling copies at the train station and to Atlanta's civic leaders. The autobiography raised enough money to purchase land and build the Carrie Steele Orphan Home in 1888, the first and oldest African American orphanage in the state of Georgia. The home provided shelter, education, and vocational training to thousands of children over the following decades, operating continuously through two world wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights era. Steele Logan died in 1900, but the institution she founded survived and evolved, eventually becoming the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home, which continues to serve at-risk children and families in the Atlanta metropolitan area.