| City/Town: • Cedartown |
| Location Class: • School |
| Built: • 1953 | Abandoned: • 2012 |
| Status: • Abandoned |
| Photojournalist: • Gage Griffith |
Table of Contents
Sarah Murphy
Born in 1892 to Gabriel and Huldah McLendon, former slaves on an Alabama plantation, Sarah McLendon was the tenth of eleven children. Her mother passed away when Sarah was just four years old, leaving her to care for her younger brother, James, from an early age. By the age of 12, she was earning money for her family by selling mail-order flavorings, and her contributions helped her father and stepmother purchase a 20-acre tract of land.
Sarah attended Spelman Seminary later renamed Spelman College the oldest private historically Black liberal arts institution for women in Atlanta. However, she left a year before graduating to return home.
At 28, Sarah married Marion “Shug” Murphy, and together they saved enough to purchase an old five-room house on an acre of land. In 1931, she officially opened her own school in Grady, Georgia, where impoverished Black families paid just 50 cents per month for their children’s education.
Sarah had a deep love for the children she taught, but her greatest joy came from the birth of her daughter, Divinia. Tragically, Divinia passed away in 1934 at the age of nine due to blood poisoning.
Sarah Murphy Orphans Home
The course of the Murphy’s lives and their school changed dramatically when they took in six children including a newborn who had been orphaned after their mother died in childbirth. Soon, more children began arriving at their doorstep, and before long, the couple was caring for 18 children on a combined salary of just $25 per month.
As the number of children in their care grew, the Murphy’s provided not only education but also food, clothing, and shelter for nearly 50 children at a time. Following the heartbreaking loss of her own daughter, Sarah Murphy applied to officially incorporate their home as an orphanage. In 1935, her efforts were recognized when the state granted a charter, officially establishing the Sarah Murphy Home as the only African American orphanage in the state of Georgia.
In 1950, a fire sparked by a wood stove devastated the Murphy Home, leaving the Murphy family and the 51 children in their care temporarily homeless. The tragedy drew the attention of a local Methodist women’s chapter, which stepped in to provide temporary housing and tents for the property.
Donations soon poured in from across the state, allowing for the construction of a new school building, dormitory, and farmhouse by 1953. Sadly, Sarah Murphy passed away just months later in 1954, leaving the home in the hands of her aging husband, Marion and without Sarah’s leadership and vision, the home floundered after her death. After years of collaboration, the Women’s Division of the Methodist Church officially acquired the Murphy Home in 1961, To operate it as part of the church’s outreach.
Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centers
In 1984, after years of operation under the Methodist Church, the Women’s Division merged the Sarah Murphy Orphanage with the Harpst Home, a Cedartown orphanage founded in 1924 by Ethel Harpst as a refuge for girls. This merger officially established the Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centers.
By 1987, Murphy-Harpst was certified as a Residential Treatment Provider, offering Maximum Room, Board, and Watchful Oversight Residential Services, Therapeutic Foster Care, and Core Outpatient Services. With this designation, Murphy-Harpst became one of only four facilities outside of state hospitals equipped to care for children with severe emotional and behavioral challenges.
In 2003, after being used for storage since 1998, the Sarah Murphy Home buildings were revitalized to serve as the Specialized Foster Care program for Murphy-Harpst. This included a community services initiative, where children over the age of 14 participated in local volunteer programs. Up to 18 children from the community services Program lived on the property, though they had more freedom than those on the main campus, including the ability to attend local schools.
In 2004, the 1954 school building from the Sarah Murphy Home was repurposed into a Pre-K/Head Start program operated by Tallatoona, which remained in use until around 2012.
Today, the Sarah Murphy campus stands abandoned. Murphy-Harpst relocated the Specialized Foster Care program to its main campus around 2018, leaving the school building filled with deteriorating boxes of foster care and human services files. Some demolition work was started on the property, and in 2020, the asphalt roads were torn up, and trees were felled.
Gallery Below of Sarah Murphy Home
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