The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Women’s legacies endure at Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centers
Founders created a safe place for abused and neglected youths.
On Monday night, hundreds of longtime Atlantans gathered at Flourish in Buckhead to remember the late Carey Carter in fun, fitting style. No funeral for the hairstylist and philanthropist everyone loved. Instead, his close friends Liz Lapidus, Tony Conway, business partners Perri Higbie and Mitchell Barnes and Saks Fifth Avenue’s vice president and general manager Cathie Wilson organized a fabulous cocktail reception and fashion show.
“Don’t you agree this is the best way to celebrate Carey’s life?” Higbie said.
The event raised money for Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centers in Cedartown, an organization Carter visited often and furnished with enough books to stock a library that was named after him. His support was both impactful and poignant. He was always reluctant to talk about his past but revealed to those close to him how he was abandoned by his mother as a child and grew up in a grim series of foster homes.
“Carey had so much in common
with these kids,” Higbie said.
Carter’s devoted support helped Murphy-Harpst, a residential treatment center for abused and neglected children, stay open and to continue the legacies of
Sarah McLendon Murphy and Ethel Harpst.
Murphy was the 10th of 11 children born to former slaves in northwest Georgia. After her mother died, it was left to her, at age 4, to raise her younger brother James. Enterprising from youth, Murphy was by age 12 selling mail-order flavorings, helping her father and stepmother buy 20 acres of land. James got a railroad job to help send his sister to Spelman College.
After school, Sarah and her husband Marion “Shug” Murphy purchased a five-room home they turned into a school. After the heartbreaking death of their daughter Divinia, who died at 9 of blood poisoning, Sarah had the home incorporated as the Sarah Divinia Murphy Home. She died in 1954.
Ethel Harpst was Murphy’s contemporary. She was appointed in 1914 by the Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist
Church to serve the mill village of Cedartown.
“She came there to serve women suffering from scarlet fever,” said Emily Saltino, the organization’s longtime vice president of development. “As the women were dying, they would beg her to take their children.”
Harpst took in the orphans and later those displaced by the Great Depression. The Ethel Harpst Home opened in March 1924. She died in 1967.
In 1984, the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church merged the two homes into Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centers.
Saltino read a verse in Carey’s honor Monday night that reflected the legacies of Murphy and Harpst as well: “The love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love till it’s given away.”
Information from Georgia Women of Achievement was used in this article.