Margaretta Brua Cameron shared 19th-century gossip with 21st-century audiences.
“Not everyone in Harrisburg was pro-abolition, but they should have been,” she seethed. “Am I right? I’m right!”
Audience members nodded in agreement. “Right!” they said.
This was for performances of “Iron Lady Hospitality: Alive in Harrisburg Cemetery,” presented by Homeland Center and Harrisburg Cemetery & Arboretum. For two remarkable weekends in September, the women founders of the Home for the Friendless came back to life and highlighted the unbroken line from their work to today’s Board of Managers.
Homeland’s story dates back to 1867, when women and children coming to Harrisburg for their Civil War pensions lived on the streets. Redoubtable civic leader Eliza Haldeman convinced nine Harrisburg churches to elect two women each to serve on a board to create a place for them to live.
Today, their Home for the Friendless continues as Homeland Center, renowned for its commitment to care, comfort, and quality of life.
As Homeland approached its 160th anniversary, the theme became the original managers. For one initiative, Homeland Marketing Director Wendy Shumaker recruited award-winning playwright Cindy Rock Dlugolecki to write a play scheduled for performances at Gamut Theatre, in their downtown Harrisburg facility, which was one of the founding churches, May 13 to 16, 2027.
Dlugolecki suggested the tombstone tour after learning that 16 of the 18 women are buried in Harrisburg Cemetery. Her lively monologues conveyed the intertwined lives of eight founders, plus one supportive man from the original Board of Trustees.
The stunning landscape of Harrisburg Cemetery offered the perfect backdrop for the first weekend, when actors in Victorian attire stood at the managers’ gravesites and shared their triumphs and challenges. Many of the ladies marveled at their power to overcome the constraints of their time.
“I lived long enough to see women get the right to vote, making my vote equal to that of a man!” marveled Anne Buehler Lamberton, played by Sam Speraw. “Hallelujah!!”
The next Saturday, the costumed actors reconvened in Homeland’s Main Dining Room. With photos of their graves projected behind them, they recreated the cemetery tour for attentive Homeland residents, staff, and guests.
Remarkably, the Homeland Center Board of Managers represents a direct line from the founders. Still comprising 18 women, the BOM tirelessly maintains Homeland’s welcoming atmosphere. Each day, they redecorate public spaces, fill planters, host fun resident parties like ’50s sock hops, and more to give Homeland its homelike feel.
The BOM’s history “came out loud and clear” through “Iron Lady Hospitality” performances, says Board of Managers President Nancy Hull. The founders accomplished miracles despite the legal constraints preventing them from voting or taking out loans, and today’s BOM has a solemn legacy to uphold,
“We call ourselves ‘The Sisterhood,’” says Hull. “We have worked very well as a group, and everybody has put forth so much energy to keep going the way we hope the founding women would want us to. Our whole mission is to make Homeland a home for the residents. This is their home, and we hope the things we do make them feel that they are home.”
The show’s director, Janet Bixler, agreed that she and the actors “marveled at how the mission of the original managers is honored every day by the current managers after all these years, staying so true to and genuinely living the good work of kindness, hospitality and the powerful personal rewards that come from doing good work for others.”
One of the actors, Diane McCormick, closed the show as the formidable Margaretta Brua Cameron. The wife of notoriously corrupt Civil War cabinet secretary Simon Cameron had found herself shunned by fair-weather friends in “polite society.” But through the Home for the Friendless, Margaretta met “women with a heart for the less fortunate – women who became true friends.”
Margaretta admitted that her Scot blood occasionally enjoyed “a taste of the homeland.”
“Here’s to the hospitality of Eliza Haldeman, the Home for the Friendless, and all the managers,” Margaretta said to the many audiences. “May all of you remember who we are – the Iron Ladies of Harrisburg!”
