The story below is from our November/December 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Photo above: Courtesy of the Virginia Room
On a late summer night in 1942, a newborn was left on the steps of Roanoke Hospital. She captured the hearts of those who cared for her, and local detectives tried in vain to determine her identity and who had abandoned her.
In Lot 101 of Section 14 at Evergreen Burial Park is interred a mystery.
About a dozen people gathered at that grave on an early September morning in 1942 and lay to rest a 24-day-old infant known only as “Little Baby X.”
The newborn female had been placed on the steps of the Roanoke Hospital during the night of August 10th that year wrapped in a flannel shirt and bath towel and placed in a small cardboard box. The unseen person had slipped away after making the drop, leaving not a single clue as to the child’s identity or circumstances.
By the time the infant was discovered, she was near death. Blue and pale from the night air, she was rushed inside and immediately given oxygen in an effort to alleviate her troubled breathing. Doctors quickly determined that she had been delivered by a physician, or at least someone with medical training and equipment.
Roanoke detectives had little to go on to find the infant’s mother. The infant’s parents were white and, believing the birth was attended by a physician, investigators reached out to all hospitals in the area and surrounding counties.
No child had been born whose birth had not been officially recorded and whose mother was not recovering comfortably under hospital care. Even retired physicians were contacted, but none indicated having recently delivered a baby. Police had only dead ends.
Roanoke’s child welfare nurse had begun preparing for the infant’s care upon release from the hospital, a process that normally involved alerting the press so that the public could be made aware of the need for an adoption. Meanwhile, hospital nurses and doctors were doing everything they could to render medical care and to provide the tiny infant with human warmth – rocking her, singing to her, cradling her.
For all the attention, Little Baby X was not responding. Her breathing remained a struggle, and her abandonment in the hours following birth was taking its toll.
Police and hospital officials quietly discouraged the local police reporter from publicizing the infant’s plight, hoping the mother or some relative might come to claim the child. If the press reported on Little Baby X it might keep relatives away to avoid shame and embarrassment. Days turned into weeks, and no one came.
After three weeks at Roanoke Hospital, Little Baby X’s condition was not improving. On the morning of September 3rd, the infant died. Never claimed and never named. “Little Baby X” had been ascribed to her by the nurses.
The Roanoke Times police reporter penned the baby’s story with atypical emotion. He took it upon himself to start a flower fund for the infant’s burial, and others having learned of the child’s circumstances volunteered their services.
William Lotz, a local funeral director, donated a casket, and Paul Coffey of Evergreen Burial Park donated a plot. The reporter’s flower fund provided for a large floral spray that adorned the casket, an arrangement deeply discounted by florist Frank Wertz.
A photograph of the flowers that appeared in the Roanoke newspaper showed a ribbon that read, “Baby X.” A grave marker was given by Ralph Mills of Magic City Granite Works.
At 11 a.m. on September 4, the Reverend Charles Gentry of First Wesleyan Church offered a graveside prayer, and the tiny casket was lowered into the ground beneath the shade of a towering fir tree. About a dozen persons attended the brief service.
“Thus was ended another tragic chapter in the life of an ever-changing world,” read the Roanoke Times. “An unnamed child, gone to its last resting place. Gone – yes, but not forgotten by those who, least concerned, made an unpretentious display of that deepest-rooted emotion of human nature – a tender spot in their hearts.”
Roanoke detectives had one promising lead in the days after the burial, but it, like any others, proved fruitless.
The idea of abandoning a child was not as remote as one might think during the years of World War II. On another occasion in Roanoke a couple, who had stayed at the Hotel Roanoke, found an infant in the back seat of their car that was in the hotel parking lot. A few days later, the infant’s grandparents in Floyd County claimed the child.
Roanoke’s child welfare nurse shared in a report to the City Council in late 1945 that, during the war years, 113 children had been entrusted to the care of her department, primarily due to their mothers being destitute and fathers being overseas in service.
Of all such cases, however, Little Baby X was unique in that no claims for the child were ever made, and the mystery surrounding her abandonment was never solved.
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