If you drive North Broadway you have passed it a thousand times. A big green campus up near the Hastings line, quiet behind the trees. Almost nobody who passes it knows the whole thing traces back to a woman getting on the wrong boat in 1853.
A Bad Year And A Wrong Turn
That year a family named Bourne left Switzerland for America. The crossing was long and hard, and the father died on the way. His widow arrived in New York Harbor with her children and a plan to reach Boston.
She took the wrong ferry. She got off in Yonkers.
The Dyckmans opened their door. They gave the Bournes room to rest and recover on their farm on the slopes above the river. When the mother decided to continue on to Boston with one of her children, the Dyckmans, who had no children of their own, asked whether six-year-old Julia could stay.
She stayed. She took their name. She grew up on that farm.
The Marriage
In 1869 Julia Dyckman married John Emory Andrus, the son of a Methodist minister. He made his first fortune in medicine, through the Arlington Chemical Company. After that came real estate, timber, railroads and Standard Oil. He was said to be one of the ten richest men in the country.
He was a Yonkers man in the official sense too. Andrus was elected the 22nd Mayor of Yonkers in 1903. From 1905 to 1913 he represented New York's 19th district in Congress. In 1917 he set up a family foundation and called it Surdna, which is Andrus spelled backwards.
The Promise
At some point Julia asked something of her husband, and he agreed to it. When she died, he did it.
In 1927 Andrus announced an orphanage on a 110-acre tract in Yonkers. It opened in 1928. It sat on the Dyckman farm, the same ground where Julia had been taken in as a child, and it was named the Julia Dyckman Andrus Memorial. The idea was to give orphaned children the thing Julia had been given by strangers. A door that opened.
For more than sixty years the Surdna Foundation paid for all of it.
What It Is Now
The orphanage became a school. The school became something larger. A study of foster children in the 1970s led Andrus to launch The Orchard School, which added academics and clinical services. Over the following decades the work moved toward children's mental health. Andrus built out behavioral health clinics, residential programs and community-based services across Westchester.
It now reaches more than 5,000 children and families a year, and its training arm carries the work well past Yonkers.
Almost a hundred years on, all of it is still running on a promise a man made to his wife, who only ended up in this city because her mother boarded the wrong ferry.
Photo credits: the Andrus archive at andrus1928.org, Bain News Service via the Library of Congress, and the 1867 Beers map of Yonkers.
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