| Sources |
- [S75] Atchley Funeral Home Records, Volume II, 1955-1973, Larry D. Fox, (Smoky Mountain Historical Society), 14 Dec 1963.
Bryan Edward Loveday obituary
- [S75] Atchley Funeral Home Records, Volume II, 1955-1973, Larry D. Fox, (Smoky Mountain Historical Society), 14 Dec 1963.
Fern Parrott Loveday obituary
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 3 Oct 2010.
Loveday: Home ‘literally a lifesaver’
by DEREK HODGES
Ronnie Loveday and his five siblings were able to stay together at The Home after their parents died in an automobile accident when he was 14 years old.
It may have been 47 years ago, but Ronnie Loveday remembers very well the day his parents died.
A 14-year-old boy in 1963, he had just returned from a Saturday hunting trip when an aunt came to the house to get him, his older brother and four younger sisters.
“She told us there had been an accident,” Loveday recalls. “We found out later the car had gone off an embankment. They said my dad was killed instantly, but my mother was trapped in the car. She survived until about 10:30 that night. She was eight and a half months pregnant, so really there were three of them killed.”
The children, ranging in age from 16 to 5, were devastated. Loveday says he felt like a boy lost, wandering in a world that could offer him no home. His chief concern was losing the only “home” he had left — his siblings.
“Who in the world would keep six children?” he wondered as the youngsters’ future was debated. “I just knew we were never going to see each other again.”
As it turned out the brothers and sisters found a home with their grandmother, though that would only prove temporary. The 75-year-old found she had passed her child-rearing days.
“She kept us as long as she could, but it was just more than she could handle,” Loveday says. “I ended up going to work with an uncle and aunt. It was a mistake and I should have known better, but you don’t learn something like that until you have the experience.”
Loveday had the experience and found himself even more miserable. He was alone and in a situation that seemed to get worse daily. He remembered how a woman from Smoky Mountain Children’s Home had come to talk to him and his sisters, trying to convince them they could have a better life and stay together if they would give the ministry a chance.
His sisters took the social worker up on her offer, but Loveday resisted. Her words came back to him as he felt himself hit rock bottom there in his kin’s house.
“I walked out the door with nothing but the clothes on my back,” he remembers. “I walked all the way to the children’s home and when I got there, I just sat down on the curb in front of the gates and bawled. I felt like there was nothing for me in the whole world.”
Fortunately, someone in the children’s home, which at the time in 1964 was moving from dormitory style living to group homes on the campus, saw Loveday sitting there in his despair. The person — Loveday says he can’t remember who came out to get him and later carted him to his family’s home to get his things — took Loveday in and gave him his first introduction to what would become his home for the next five years.
What he found there was a structure the children had been missing since their parents died and the caring attention of dedicated house parents.
“The love and care they gave us is probably more than you’d find anywhere,” Loveday says. “It was literally a livesaver. Had the Home not been there, there’s no telling where we would have ended up. When you’re a kid who has lost his parents, it makes a big difference just to be together with your siblings and to have each other. I don’t know how you would make it without that.”
Loveday met and married a girl at the home, and kept in touch with those who made the difference for him there. His house parents passed away a few years ago, but he still talks to the social worker he says was “like a mother” to him regularly.
He’s also gone out on the lecture circuit, talking to anyone and everyone who will listen, from officials with the Church of God to those who attended September’s Area Attractions Lunch, about the value of supporting the ministry.
His message is simple and deeply personal.
“I can never repay The Home for what it did for us,” he says. “They gave us a life. The Home for Children is the best thing that could ever happen to Sevier County. They’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
dhodges@themountainpress.com
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 3 Oct 2010.
90 years of Hope and Healing: The Home dedicated to making a difference
by DEREK HODGES The Mountain Press
Children with the Church of God Orphanage in Cleveland, Tenn., pose for a photo in this undated photo. The orphanage eventually moved from Cleveland to Sevier County and is now known as The Home.
The orphanage grew over the years to accept more children in need of a home. Beginning in one small frame house, two more houses were added before a larger facility was built in Cleveland on 119 acres to house several hundred children.
A resident of The Home climbs the tower as part of the Certified Ropes Course, which helps youth develop self-esteem, improve confidence and learn to trust themselves. The Home made its move to Sevierville in 1949, occupying the building that used to serve as the Church of God Bible Training School.
As they mark 90 years of serving youngsters in need, the folks at Smoky Mountain Children’s Home are rededicating themselves to “giving children a chance.”
The organization has seen many changes in its nearly a century of work, from its start as an orphanage in southeastern Tennessee to its current unofficial name change, adopting the more colloquial title of “The Home.” Through it all, though, the mission has remained the same.
“The Smoky Mountain Children’s Home provides hope and healing for abused, neglected and abandoned children,” Public Relations Coordinator Beth Nuckles Durham says. “We strive to give each child on our campus a chance for a real home, a parent’s love, warm meals, a safe place to live, and all of the opportunities necessary for growth and success.”
According to the official history kept by The Home, that mission started in 1920, when four young children were given a home with Lillian Kinsey in Cleveland, Tenn. The small frame house eventually became known as Orphanage Number One as the Church of God in the state created its ministry to homeless children.
Two more homes were added before a large facility capable of housing several hundred children was built on land south of Cleveland. That site became known as the Church of God Orphanage, with its mission to provide shelter mostly for homeless and orphaned children. The Home’s history lists “poverty, illness and death of one or both parents” as the “primary reasons children needed care.”
As the years passed, that focus started to shift away from mainly those youngsters whose caretakers had died to many whose homes weren’t a safe place to be. The facility started taking in what were then called “orphans of the living,” those children who were victims of neglect and abuse at home.
As the number of youth served by the organization continued to grow into the middle of the century, officials started looking for a new place to locate the orphanage. With the Church of God Bible Training School recently closing its doors in Sevierville, it was decided that the sprawling campus on the banks of the Little Pigeon River would be a great new site for the operation.
When that facility opened to the children in 1949, the focus was still very much on dormitory style care, but, just as the type of youngsters being served had shifted over the years, so too had the idea of how they should be treated evolved. Like institutions in its line of work across the country, the orphanage began to switch to focus more on foster family care and residential treatment centers.
To go along with the transition, the name of the facility was officially changed in 1962 to Church of God Home for Children. The same year, social work and counseling services were added to more effectively address the needs of the children served at the home.
Shortly thereafter, cottage-type homes for the children began to spring up on land surrounding the old dormitories like so many mushrooms. In that setting, officials with the Church of God believed, the children could be better served, particularly those who needed, because of neglect or abuse, more personal attention.
“The next couple of decades saw even more changes with emphasis on specialized care for abused and emotionally disturbed children,” the history on the organization’s Web site reads. “Intensive training for the primary care givers was begun to better prepare them for the needs of children coming into care.”
Program Director John Sweet remembers some of those intense changes, particularly those of the last few decades.
“Things really began to change in the 1980s and 90s,” Sweet says. “That’s when things changed because we were seeing more violence against children and even seeing more children perpetrate violence against other children.”
Today, The Home relies on an army of house mothers and fathers, who literally live with the children in the cottages, helping provide not just for their physical needs but also caring for them emotionally. At-risk children and teens are cared for through the Residential Care and Foster Care programs, and the center offers family counseling, individual therapy, educational opportunities and structured group living.
In a conclusion filled with hope, the history states that The Home exists now for, “Creating a safe and supportive environment for each resident to discover their talents and build on their strengths, and through the care of a trained staff each resident has the opportunity to overcome the circumstances of their past while exploring a world of opportunity for their future.”
As they work to ensure that mission will be continued into the future, supporters of The Home are planning a considerable fundraising effort, including a banquet on December 9, just eight days before the official 90th anniversary.
They’ve also expressed dedication to the slogan they’ve adopted for the celebration year, “Give a child a chance.”
“We really believe in giving the children we serve a chance,” Durham says. “Some of our children come in and they’ve never slept in a bed. They just think it’s so great.”
As an illustration, Durham recalls an experience she had at this year’s Patriot Festival in Pigeon Forge. She went to the event hoping to pass information about The Home to members of the band Diamond Rio, who are known for their philanthropy. As she waited to talk to the men, she noticed a little boy watching her carefully, though she didn’t know why until he approached her with a question.
“He asked me, ‘Don’t you work at the children’s home,’” Durham recalls. “It turned out he was one of our children who had recently been sent back home. He told me things were really rough at home and he really wanted to come back. He asked me, ‘Is there any way you could get me back in there?’”
The boy is now transitioning back to The Home and Durham says she believes she’s made a difference by taking him out of the abusive situation he was in.
“God had different plans for me that night,” she says, pointing out she was just an assistant at The Home at the time. “I was there to meet that child.”
dhodges@themountainpress.com
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, d. 14 Dec 1963 (Age 40 years) 
