SALEM — At 12 years old, Rick Cormier had already seen the state's full range of housing for neglected children: foster care, adoptive homes, a lock-up facility.
Then he saw the Plummer Home.
It was like nothing Cormier had seen before. The 19th-century mansion looked more like a home than an institution. it was surrounded by green grass on one side, the ocean on the other. There were boys his own age playing baseball on the home's own field. There were adults there who understood him.
He stayed for seven years.
"Plummer Home was probably the best thing that happened to me," said Cormier, now 32. "I realize that more now than I did then."
Hidden away on Winter Island in Salem, the Plummer Home for Boys has achieved a kind of accidental anonymity — people know it is there without ever really knowing much about it. But since 1855, the home has helped hundreds of boys like Cormier put their lives back together. And as they prepare to celebrate the home's 150th birthday, supporters are about ready to put that anonymity behind them.
"A lot of people in Salem don't know who we are," said Brendan Walsh, a retired school administrator who chairs Plummer Home's board of trustees. "We're trying to change that."
Trustees will host an anniversary celebration Saturday and will kick off an effort to increase awareness of the home and its mission.
The home has changed in the 150 years since Caroline Plummer bequeathed $26,196.68 to the "founding of a farm school of reform for boys." For one thing, it's no longer a farm. For another, it is no longer a reform school — in 1955, it became a home for abandoned and neglected boys.
These days, the home has tutors, social workers and psychologists to work with the 15-or-so boys who live there at one time.
But the core mission has remained the same: to give stability and structure to boys who have known little of either.
"Caroline Plummer's intent was to help the children of Salem," Walsh said.
Plummer herself is an interesting story. The daughter of a well-known doctor, Plummer was known as the life of the party.
"Whenever she was going to go to a ball or a party, people would just show up because she was going to be there," said Richard Scott, who wrote a history of the home for the 150th anniversary.
Plummer, who never married, inherited a fortune from her brother, Ernestus, a successful merchant.
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She was a noted philanthropist, endowing a chair of Christian morals at Harvard, currently held by the Rev. Peter Gomes, and leaving the money to build Plummer Hall, which was once home to the Salem Athenaeum and now houses the Phillips Library.
A real home
The home began as a reform school, but Scott said it was never the nightmarish place that word conjures up. Records from the early days show staff members who had a genuine concern for the boys.
"William seems to be a boy who has been very much neglected," a staff member wrote about one boy in 1870. "Has sore eyes and a weakly construction. He ran away from the Sisters of Charity and since then has slept out in such places as he could find."
"The administrator did not think about these kids as worthless," Scott said. "He thought they were redeemable."
That attitude continues today.
"The staff (members) were down to earth," Cormier said. "They treated you like a human being; they didn't treat you as a patient. They treated you like one of their kids."
"It's like any adolescents anywhere," Walsh said. "You let them know what the rules are, and then you wait for them to test the rules. They're kids. They're adolescent boys, and they're like any other adolescent boys, except with a lot more baggage."
Cormier is one of the home's success stories. He stayed there through college and now lives in Beverly and works for a plastics extrusion company in Ipswich. He credits the home with giving structure to his life: dinner at 5:30 p.m., study time at 7, bed at 11. The staff forced him to save half the money he earned, money that ultimately helped him go to college, buy a car and get an apartment.
"Putting it in there hurt me more than anything," Cormier said, "but boy am I glad I did now."
But the home also felt like home, and because most boys go to Salem High School, they can become part of the community.
"You had a sense of freedom that you could do things and you could live a normal life," Cormier said, "where all the other places I'd lived before that had felt like institutions."
Today, the Plummer Home is changing again. The state Department of Social Services, which oversees the home, now sends boys there for just a few months, rather than years. But as long as it sits on its 18 acres on Winter Island, it will never feel like an institution.
"I would venture to guess that there's not another home in the universe that's got our setting," Walsh said.
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