Lavercantière Children’s Home

The more I learn, the more I realize how much more there is to explore and learn. An earlier post (here) showed a 1940s photograph of the MCC children’s home located at Lavercantière, in southern France. At that time I was unable to locate with any certainty the building in which the home had operated. Thanks to the arrival of a recently purchased book titled Relief Work as Pilgrimage, I now know where the children’s home was located and can confirm that the building still stands.

The front matter of that book contains Roy Blackman’s hand-drawn map of Lavercantière, which depicts all the streets and buildings within that small village (Heisey and Heisey 2015, xiii). One building shown on the map is the Château de Lavercantière, which is further identified as the site of the MCC children’s home. With that information in hand, it was easy to find the village and the exact building in the village on Google Maps (see the building with the red pin here).

The Château de Lavercantière has a long history dating back to the tenth century, when the de Gourdon family held the feudal lordship (seignory) over the surrounding area. The original castle is said to have been taken by Richard the Lionheart in 1188. The present building was erected during the seventeenth century on the foundation of the medieval castle; the original plans were for the building to have a double-t layout (i.e., ⊢⊣, if there were no space in the middle). However, only a west wing (left end in the photo below) was added, and that not until the following century (all information from here). The photograph below, taken by Michel Chanaud, is of the south façade.

The black-and-white photograph in the earlier post appears to have been taken from the opposite side of the building; if so, it shows the north façade. A photo taken from the northeast corner shows the same general area as the MCC photo, albeit from a different angle (© Ministère de la Culture [France], Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, diffusion RMN-GP; here).

Why, you may ask, did the MCC establish a children’s home in a seventeenth-century French château? According to John D. Unruh’s history of the MCC, “The children’s colonies were usually housed in large country estates evacuated since the war” (Unruh 1952, 102). To state the matter simply, these buildings were large and could house a large number of children, and they were vacant and available for the MCC to rent. Thus the MCC’s choice of the Château de Lavercantière was no anomaly but rather the MCC’s standard practice (see, e.g., the end of the post here for the similar Château de Vair children’s home).

Like the children’s home at Canet-Plage (here), which it succeeded, the Lavercantière home operated for a relatively short time, from 1943 to 1948. According to Heisey and Heisey (2015, 41), Augustin Coma, a Spanish refugee who worked with the MCC, signed a three-year lease for the château on 23 December 1942, roughly a month after Henry and Bea had married and eight weeks before they were interned at Baden-Baden. “The decision to move the colony was a hard one,” they write, “since MCC funds in Switzerland were inaccessible for some time and the château in Lavercantière needed repairs to make it livable” (2015, 41).

It remains unclear who actually made the lease payment (perhaps Coma or other relief workers?), but the move from Canet-Plage took place not long after:

The move of children from Canet-Plage to Lavercantière occurred sometime between late January and early March 1943. We can only guess at the monumental labor of gaining approval for and physically moving children, staff, and provisions during the war. In 2007, one of those children, Sara (Sarrano) Abadie, remembered traveling by train to Cahors with a cardboard identification necklace and then in open-bed trucks to Lavercantière. What dangers attended the trip, especially for the Jewish children? (Heisey and Heisey 2015, 42)

This children’s home, we learn later, was especially dear to Henry and Bea. In his last report as director of the MCC’s French operations, Henry wrote, 

Dec. 28–31—On the 28th Beatrice and I traveled to Lavercantière by trains and spent the rest of the year with the folks there. The warmer family spirit of this home has always struck me—I feel it is due to the core of workers (mostly Spanish) that have been with the “SECOURS MENNONITE” for more than five years. They all genuinely LOVE the children. Elsie Bechtel has very understandingly and ably seconded this atmosphere. It was a real pleasure for Beatrice and myself to end 1946 in LAVERCANTIÈRE!!! (Heisey and Heisey 2015, 118)

There is much more about Lavercantière, not to mention the MCC’s relief work in Europe, waiting to be discovered. Some of these stories can be read in M. J. and Nancy R. Heisey’s Relief Work as Pilgrimage: “Mademoiselle Miss Elsie” in Southern France, 1945–1948; other stories no doubt await discovery in the correspondence, records, and archives of the MCC itself.

Works Cited

Heisey, M. J., and Nancy R. Heisey. 2015. Relief Work as Pilgrimage: “Mademoiselle Miss Elsie” in Southern France, 1945–1948. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Unruh, John D. 1952. In the Name of Christ: A History of the Mennonite Central Committee and Its Service 1920–1951. Scottadale, PA: Herald.