As the patron saint of children, St. Nicholas has been a special father to our boys’ school, but there is another reason why we look to him for intercession and protection. Gregory the Great Academy is housed in a beautiful old building of historical significance that was originally named for St. Nicholas, himself an orphan, as a home for orphans a century ago.

The St. Nicholas Orphanage building was designed by the architectural firm of Morris and McHale of Scranton, PA and built at a cost of $400,000.

With the cornerstone laid in 1921 before 5,000 people, and completed in 1923 with steel and brick, slate, plaster, and terrazzo, and cross-crowned cupola with a bell baptized “Michael” hanging above a glorious chapel, the St. Nicholas Greek Catholic Orphanage was constructed on the old Throop family farm in Elmhurst by the Greek Catholic Union. It was designed to provide lodging for up to 500 orphans and was also a site of an annual pilgrimage for thousands of Greek Catholics. Dr. Benjamin Throop, a local physician and Civil War doctor, bequeathed his property to the Greek Catholic Union at his death, establishing the site for this noble refuge for poor children.

Over 6,000 people attended the 1923 dedication of the St. Nicholas Orphanage in the tiny town of Elmhurst, with special trains engaged to accommodate the crowd and liturgies celebrated by the Very Reverend Gabriel Martyak of the Greek Catholic Union and Bishop M. J. Hoban of the Diocese of Scranton.

Mother Macrina Melnychuk, Mother Superior of the Sisters of St. Basil.

The orphanage and its 350-acre farm were managed by the stalwart Sisters of St. Basil, who also oversaw the education and spiritual welfare of the orphans. Medical needs including dentistry was conducted in the building, with a laundry outbuilding, a large gothic barn with a fully operational dairy, bay dormitories, sleeping porches, workshops, classrooms, a tremendous brick water tower, and a cemetery. Famous in local history, a great fire destroyed two stables in 1936, with farmhands mustering to save the livestock and State police shooting cattle that could not be saved from the flames.

The Romanesque chapel on the third floor was decorated by artist, Paul H. Daubner through the 1930’s and features, amid detailed stenciling and faux marbleizing, the Assumption on the ceiling surrounded by the Twelve Disciples, murals of the life of Christ on the western wall, and stained-glass windows of German make on the eastern wall featuring St. Nicholas, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, the Resurrection, Pentecost, the Nativity, and the second coming of Christ. Though the orphanage was a Byzantine establishment, the original art in the chapel is Western in its style hearkening to a time when the Eastern Church had not yet fully embraced its artistic heritage in the West.

1947 saw significant remodeling in preparation for the Silver Jubilee, the 25th anniversary of the St. Nicholas Orphanage, and the renewal of the annual pilgrimage which had been discontinued during the war. But in 1948, facing insurmountable financial hardship, the orphanage was sold to the Diocese of Scranton, with only 37 orphans and six sisters left. The Diocese consolidated the residents of St. Patrick’s Orphanage in West Scranton and St. Joseph’s Children’s and Maternity Hospital in Scranton to the facility in Elmhurst, now named the Fatima Center and staffed by Bernardine sisters and beginning a new leg of the building’s history. 

And thus passed the St. Nicholas Orphanage, going the way all orphanages went with the coming of the foster-care system, but its memory remains enshrined at Gregory the Great Academy. For years, orphans grown old would appear at our doors, though their visits have been growing fewer, asking to have a glimpse at the place where they spent both happy and sad times of their youth, remembering the sisters, and telling us what rooms and spaces once had been used for. For years, our boys have told ghost stories about spectral nuns that sweep the third-floor hall. For years, we have prayed to St. Nicholas to keep his sons safe and strong as we carry on the work of saving the souls of children.