Life comes full circle for woman living at site of her orphanage

Published: 2004-01-05

HOLYOKE, Mass. (CNS) -- It wasn't her choice to live on the hillside bordering Holyoke and West Springfield during her early childhood years, but now as she approaches the end of the seventh decade of her life Noella Neill is happy with her decision to return there. Sitting in the cozy living room of her small apartment at Providence Place, she told The Catholic Observer, newspaper of the Springfield Diocese, about how her life changed in 1931 when she was 6 years old and her mother, Emma Desrosiers, died of tuberculosis at age 44. During the period when her mother's health worsened and her father struggled to find work, Neill lived for two years in a section of Westfield Sanitarium with other children of similar experience. In 1932, because an inability to drive made it difficult for her father to visit her in Westfield, she was moved to Mount St. Vincent Orphanage in Holyoke. There she lived on the hill overlooking the Connecticut River until 1939. The Sisters of Providence motherhouse on the orphanage site is what became the reconstructed and renamed Providence Place.

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