Life at the shelter for boys

by Brian Swartz

After Fred Forest Pease came to Lewiston to help Frank Winter organize the Androscoggin Boys Club in Lewiston, the men realized that for various reasons some boys needed greater opportunity to improve their lives. This need led to establishing Opportunity Farm for Boys on a New Gloucester hilltop in 1910 and incorporating the organization in mid-June 1912.

Intended to shelter boys and help them develop life- and work skills, the farm was managed initially by Pease and his wife. Coming from broken homes, poverty, and often both situations, boys attended school and worked on the farm. Its first residents were three homeless boys involved in the Social Settlement of Lewiston and Auburn.

Operating with two separate New Gloucester campuses, the organization was renamed Opportunity Farm for Boys and Girls in 2002. Many residents have lived at Opportunity Farm over the years; among them was Ray Darling, only age 2 when he was placed in foster care after his parents’ 1923 divorce.

His older brothers Clifford and Melvin went to live at Opportunity Farm, and Ray joined them in 1924 and stayed at the farm until 1936. During the Opportunity Farm’s 2010 centennial celebration, he shared with the Lewiston

Sun Journal his “very positive, favorable thoughts” about living at the farm. “We did every possible job that needed to be done. Opportunity Farm helped me to develop a work ethic.”

After Ray died in Florida in May 2019, a subsequent Citrus County Chronicle article about his life included memories about his Opportunity Farm years.

Another former resident, Roland Soucy of Levant, has different memories about living there. He and his brother, Raymond, came to Opportunity Farm via a family breakup. After their parents divorced, their mother could not care for them and their sister, Tammy, two years older than Roland.

Because the Soucys were Catholic, the boys went to the Healy Asylum, a Franciscan nun-operated boys’ orphanage at 81 Ash Street in Lewiston.

When Roland was 11½, the Soucy brothers were transferred to Opportunity Farm because boys had to leave Healy Asylum when they turned 12. The brothers arrived at New Gloucester, where “they separated us,” said Roland. “I was older, but he grew up so fast” and was so tall that Raymond moved into what Roland called the “Big House,” a large farmhouse where the older boys lived. “There was close to 35 boys, teenagers,” in that building, which was managed by a married couple.

Roland lived in the “Lower Dorm,” which housed about 25 boys ranging from 8 to 12 years old. The house parents were a married couple with a child “who did not play with us.”

Another married couple with a son