In 1919, Coral Shay lit a fire in the basement of the Belmont Home. But she wasn’t cold — she was desperate.

Young women had been sent to the home for being incorrigible, difficult, promiscuous — and the institution had a habit of never letting go of women they deemed feeble-minded. Coral had been living inside the Yorkville compound there since she was 14 — for a theft in her hometown of Forest, Ont. She was now about to turn 30, her entire youth spent scrubbing collars and sewing buttons, sleeping in dorms, and staring out of barred windows at the city she was not a part of.

Sent to the Belmont in 1905, she missed the rise of the motor car, the sinking of the Titanic, a world war, and her youth.

In December 1919, she stood in the ironing room in the basement, and lit some straw on fire. Maybe this would be a distraction that could help her escape, or a chance to tell a firefighter how she had been a prisoner of the moral reform movement for half of her life.

But no hero swooped in. The fire was quickly extinguished, and the superintendent of the home called police. Coral Shay was arrested.

The Don Jail suited Coral. Anything was better than the Belmont Home, and maybe this time, she’d never return.

I had been reading archival stories about the Belmont Home, when Coral Shay’s hometown caught my eye. We grew up a few streets away from each other, a century apart.

Forest was bustling in her day, with businesses catering to the orchards and the rich farmland that surrounded the Lambton County town. There were apple evaporators, a barrel maker and, by 1912, basket and canning factories, local historian Fred Jamieson writes in his book, Walk Through Forest: 140 Years of Progress in a Small Ontario Town. The Grand Trunk Railway ferried people and products from Toronto to Sarnia, dropping people off in Forest for the town-wide reunion in 1905. By the turn of the century, close to 2,000 people lived in the town, and they prided themselves on their well-kept dirt roads, closely cropped lawns and granolithic sidewalks.

Thomas Shay was one of them, an Orangeman whose parents had made the leap from Ireland sometime in the first half of the 19th century. In Forest, he was a well-known carpenter, competent and trustworthy, his barns and homes scattered throughout the countryside. One family portrait shows him looking serious behind his bristly moustache, wearing a suit and tie, while another shows him standing atop the skeleton of a wooden barn, raising his hat in silhouette.

He and his wife, Margaret, had three daughters, Margaret, Mabelle and Coral. In the family photos, the elder sisters look like copies of their mother, curly dark hair swept back off their round faces, high-necked shirts secured with beautiful brooches. Coral’s hair is lighter, and hangs in the pin curls of a turn-of-the-century girl. The family lived in a small home on Main St., just west of downtown, where the road slopes into a valley.

Coral’s older sisters both married, a quiet wedding in 1905 for Margaret, who became a Sutherland, and a bouquet of white carnations and a creme crispine gown in 1906 for Mabelle, who became a Fraser. When the weddings were written up in the local paper, there was no mention of Coral, but did the rest of the town know why?

Some of the Shay descendants still live in Forest. The story they knew about Coral is echoed in a local genealogy booklet: “As a young single lady, she was sent to a home for unwed mothers to have her child. Because of social pressure of the time, it apparently caused a rift with her family and she went to Detroit to live.”

But there was another story, from century-old newspapers, about a buffalo robe, a home for wayward girls, a fire and a sensational escape. It was a story they had never heard about a woman who hadn’t been talked about for generations, and a question nobody knew to ask: what happened to Coral Shay?

Coral was sent to the Belmont Home in Toronto around 1905 for stealing a buffalo robe, an Indigenous garment usually associated with cold prairie winds. She would later say that she had been sentenced to five years’ detention by a magistrate, at the request of her parents, but the case is hard to trace. In the handwritten accounts of the Lambton County court at the Ontario Archives, people are tried for stealing horses, committing forgery and conspiring to commit an abortion, but there is no mention of Coral Shay, no entry about the buffalo robe.

The Belmont Home — also called the Industrial Refuge — had been founded in 1853 by a group of upper middle-class women concerned by the “wretched and hopeless condition of the female outcasts, who nightly are found wandering the streets of our City.” In the beginning, the founders, alarmed by moral decay in the city, targeted sex workers and intemperate drifters, thinking Christian charity would help more than jail. They lined up work, prayer and hymns, and strict rules: “Gossip, exciting or insulting language, and any allusion to past character shall be most strictly prohibited,” they noted in their first annual report.

The old registers, kept at the Ontario Archives, have pages of Adelias, Debbies and Elizas, sent to the Belmont for larceny, begging on the street, or listed as “unable to be controlled by parents.” They were described as trouble in so many words: incorrigible, wayward, immoral. Maude, from Hamilton, was an Anglican who could read and write but was incorrigible just the same: “Father drinks,” the book said. By the dawn of the 20th century, amid further anxiety about the changing world, the Belmont became the home of the “feeble-minded.”

It meant “they were not responsible for their actions, but also that they required custodial restraint,” explains Joanne Minaker, a sociology professor at MacEwan University, who wrote about the Belmont for her PhD dissertation and studies the ways girls and women are marginalized or empowered. A 1913 statute empowered doctors to certify women as feeble-minded, allowing institutions like the Belmont Home to keep them after their sentence expired, she explained.

The home was operating in a strange grey area with little oversight: run by a volunteer board, it was increasingly affiliated with the justice system by the turn of the century. By the time Coral arrived, it was part of the city’s fabric, accepted as a “non-penal, volunteer-run site for the governance of female sexuality,” Minaker writes in her chapter of Criminalizing Women.

Young women had been sent to the home by the courts, their parents, and some had admitted themselves. The Belmont included the refuge for young women, and eventually, a home for aged men and women. It was supported through a patchwork of donations from the city’s leading law firms, businesses and people, small government grants, gifts of celery, honey, coal — and most importantly, by the laundry. By 1918, the laundry, which ran on the unpaid labour of women like Coral, supplied $20,000 of a $25,000 annual budget, according to the annual report.

The board of women who ran the home were the wives, daughters and sisters of the city’s power brokers. They lived north of Bloor, in neighbourhoods like Rosedale, Deer Park and the Annex, and they had final say over admittance.

“It was really clear in all the evidence I looked at that they wanted them to live a better life, but not be their friends in the same social circle,” Minaker says of the class gap, noting that some of the women hired former inmates as domestic servants.

It was a double-edged sword of female empowerment. Upper-middle-class women were running an institution at a time when that was rare — but it was on the “back of these poor working-class girls,” Minaker says.

During the First World War, the Belmont women started to run. In 1917, Mary Mundier climbed out a window, and Pearl Duquette also fled, and both told a similar story — girls were being kept at the Belmont for “indefinite periods.”

In spring 1918, it was Lizzie Crilly who bolted during a rainy night with another inmate named Sarah Green. They ran to her brother’s home in Brockton, in smelling distances of the Cowan Chocolate Co.

“For fourteen long years Lizzie Crilly has been incarcerated in the Belmont Home on Belmont street because a bolt of lightning killed her mother in their little cottage out near High Park while she was yet a young girl,” the Star reported in late May 1918.

Her brother James wasn’t sure what to do, so he called a police inspector, and the two girls were charged with vagrancy and appeared in women’s court.

Lizzie told the magistrate she’d been in the Belmont for 14 years, but had never been charged with anything in particular. The incredulous judge told her she was free to go.

The escapes caused chaos behind the scenes, according to correspondence at the Ontario Archives. The home was furious at the bad publicity and the interference with their work. They visited the city’s board of control to “correct the bad impression”

“It was pointed out that one (girl) who had been there for fourteen years, was feeble-minded,” and “other reasons” for detaining the girls were given, the Globe reported a few days after Lizzie Crilly’s dash.

A representative from the provincial secretary’s office — a high-ranking post — explained that no girl deemed feeble-minded could be discharged without a doctor’s certificate. The aldermen agreed that it was unfortunate the judge had granted two women their freedom.

From 1917 to 1919, fewer women were admitted to the Belmont, and the brass linked the slowdown to the bad press, but internal correspondence shows they, too, were uncomfortable with the grey area they had waded into.

“The law in connection with the commitment, custody and detention of the inmates is not as definite as it should be, and we understand the Ontario Government are considering amendments to the existing Acts,” the president of the home wrote to city and provincial officials in spring 1919.

The home asked the government to appoint a doctor, and in the months that followed, 13 women were ordered released on doctors’ orders, which didn’t go over well internally either.

1919 was a year of change at the home. The Belmont was fully integrated into Canada’s correctional infrastructure, officially declared a refuge under the Female Refuges Act. The act had been on the books since 1897 and allowed the courts to send women deemed incorrigible and unmanageable, ages 15 to 35, to “low security correctional institutions,” and now the Belmont was one of them. Before 1919, the act was seldom used, but changes in 1919 gave judges “wide-ranging powers” to incarcerate, Joan Sangster writes in Journal of the History of Sexuality. A woman didn’t need to commit a crime or have a formal charge. Sometimes, all it took was a parent or a husband swearing to a woman’s “incorrigibility” before a judge.

Because of the changes, the board would no longer control the women who were admitted. But they were still trying to control who left.

Late at night, throughout 1919, the phone would ring, with people asking questions about the inmates.

“There would seem to be someone or some persons actively moving to get these girls out of the homes,” the home’s superintendent warned the province.

Amid the battle for control, Coral Shay and her friend Dolly Wells slipped outside through a door that had been left open for them on Nov. 5, 1919. It was unseasonably warm, the kind of day where you only needed a sweater.

The escape was planned with outside and inside help, according to archival documents. A Belmont employee named Mrs. Goulding gave Coral and Dolly some money to take a car across the newly built Prince Edward Viaduct, to a house on Broadview Ave. That’s where a bandleader named “Mr. Palmer” who had once performed at the home was waiting. “It appears from the statements of these girls that he is in close touch with some of the inside staff in the institution and is arranging for the escape of the inmates in this way,” an inspector from the Department of Neglected and Dependent Children wrote to the provincial secretary.

Palmer took the women to the next stop, a home at 35 Playter Cres., where a young woman named Zora Jaynes lived. Coral Shay worked as a maid for Zora, and Dolly Wells was taken to the home of Miss Jaynes’s mother, on a farm north of the city.

Later, in court, Zora would say she had no idea that Coral, her “industrious” maid, was on the lam from the Belmont but the internal documents allege she was in on the plan from the beginning. By late November, the police had found four escaped Belmont women, including Coral and Dolly, and brought them back to the compound.

That’s when Coral lit the fire — Dec. 3 — while Dolly stood watch. Both women were sent to the Don Jail and charged with arson.

Before the trial, Coral’s lawyer W.K. Murphy wrote the attorney general and the provincial secretary: he knew the home would say Coral was “of unsound mind,” but he was prepared to refute the charge and criticize her extended sentence: “If she had been convicted of manslaughter, it might be said that a sentence of 15 years would be commensurate with the crime.” What’s more, many other women at the home showed no signs of being “weakminded.” He hoped a commission or tribunal would look into the matter.

But a representative of the Belmont was also writing to the province in the lead-up to the trial, to remind them that judges were often “ignorant” of their work, and the home was “consequently unjustly placed in a very unfavourable light before the public.”

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In early December, Coral and Dolly were in women’s court for the first phase of their trial. The Belmont’s lawyer told the court that Coral had a mental age of 7 or 8 — and it would be “criminal to leave her at large.” The Crown attorney agreed that Coral “was lawfully held,” and the Belmont’s superintendent, Ruth Hinds, said when her father came to pick Coral up for visits with the family, he “was glad to have her return” to the Belmont.

Coral’s lawyer tried to push for an inquiry, and the magistrate seemed sympathetic, but ultimately, this was an arson charge, and he committed both women to trial.

The Belmont Home was pleased. “This is the first time that we have felt that we had the sympathy and backing of the Provincial authorities in our work,” president Mary Caven wrote to the government.

At the arson trial in January 1920, Coral Shay wore a coat over a khaki uniform, and stood before the crowded courtroom. The Crown objected — they did not want to hear a “sentimental sob story,” and the judge pointed out that an investigation of the home was not in his purview.

Coral said she had been “wayward” in her youth in Forest, and it had affected her schooling to the point where she was held back. She had stolen a buffalo robe, but “I didn’t think I would be sent away for all my life.” At the Belmont, she learned to read and write, but it didn’t make a difference. The doctors continued to say she was “mentally weak” for not answering math questions quickly enough. When she asked about leaving “they said they would see about it.” But they never did.

Setting the fire was a cry for help: “I thought the firemen would come and I could tell them how long I had been in the home and all about it,” she said.

Coral Shay spent 15 years in the home, but it only took the jury 20 minutes to decide she was not guilty. She and Dolly Wells were granted their freedom.

It was a small victory in an otherwise bleak landscape for women’s rights. In the coming years, the Belmont Home took an “expanded role” in incarcerating women as prosecutions under the Female Refuges Act continued, and their practices became more coercive, Minaker says. In May 1922, Mary Windsor was sentenced to two years because she didn’t obey her mother. In 1939, Velma Demerson was famously sentenced to the Belmont Home for incorrigibility, because she was pregnant and living with her boyfriend, a Chinese man.

In 1929 the woman who ran the home said the “foolish girl” was the latest nuisance. The “foolish girl” had grown up with motor cars and movie theatres, and had a relentless desire to have a good time.

“She is indignant with what she thinks is our interference with her right to do what she likes with her life,” the secretary noted in the 1929 annual report.

Minaker observes: “I mean, how dare she do what she wants with her life.”

The Belmont Home closed in 1939. The laundry had closed in 1938, and the government wasn’t keen on closing the funding gap for a penal facility run by women “with no formal training,” Minaker says. The women were transferred to the infamous and terrifying Mercer Reformatory, Canada’s first prison for women, on King St. W. A grand jury warned against it, saying that some of the girls had been sent to the Belmont by their parents, who never consented to prison.

A few weeks after the closure, a woman wrote to the Toronto Star to lament the loss of the niche role the Belmont played in “wholesome correction.”

“I know of a young woman raised in an orphanage, who, still in her teens, finds herself in trouble,” she wrote. “I would certainly recommend her to Belmont Home, where I know she could have found proper care and training. But I cannot conscientiously and will not see her send to Mercer Reformatory.”

The Mercer, the subject of its own grand jury investigation in the 1960s, was shut down in 1969 — the same era that the original Belmont buildings were bulldozed and replaced, a few years after the draconian Female Refuges Act was finally repealed. But nearly 100 years after Coral Shay’s escape, the “good girl bad girl” dichotomy remains, Minaker says.

“Boys’ delinquency is more understood as a social problem and it’s about their behaviour,” she says. But for girls, “it is still so tied today to girls’ identities and who they are.”

There is still a Belmont Home in Yorkville, but it is a non-profit retirement and long-term-care home. Instead of women hoping to get out, the home currently has a two- to five-year wait list of people waiting to get in.

Coral Shay would never appear in another newspaper for the rest of her life. Zora Jaynes, who had been involved in the earlier escape, told the court she would find her a job as a maid. Zora was always helping people — but Zora’s descendants didn’t know what happened to Coral.

In the 1920 city directory, there is no Coral Shay living with the Jaynes family, but there is a “Cora Shea” in Rosedale. The 1921 census of Canada gives no clues, but Coral could have changed her name, or left the country. A search of Ontario’s marriage index at the archives turned up no leads but there was evidence she had married. When her father died in 1924, his obituary said that his youngest daughter was married to a Charles Harris in Detroit. But when her mother died in 1944, the obituary said Coral was married to John Harris of Toronto. Was it a mistake? A guess from a family member who had lost touch? Searches through Michigan records answered no questions.

When Coral’s mother, Margaret Shay, wrote her will in the 1920s, she left the estate to her older daughters only. By the time those older sisters died in the 1960s, Coral wasn’t mentioned in the obituaries.

“I didn’t know about her until after my grandparents were deceased, and my dad was talking a little bit about her,” says Roger Sutherland, 83, Coral’s great-nephew.

His father, Alex Sutherland, who died in the 1990s, had memories of visiting his Aunt Coral in an institution when he was a little boy. He thought he and Thomas Shay went to Detroit, “but he wasn’t that old at the time, he could have gone to Toronto, and been told it was Detroit,” Sutherland says.

The Victorian buildings of Coral’s childhood in Forest remain, but the industrial heyday of small-town Canada has passed. The railways, the basket factory, the canning enterprises are all gone. Roger Sutherland lives around the corner from the original Shay home. As a boy, he’d visit with Coral’s mother and his great-grandmother, Margaret Shay. He had no idea Coral existed back then, but his great-grandmother never talked about the past.

Roger and his wife, Diane, have the family photos, with the entire family dressed in their best outfits, but they never knew the real story about the girl in pin curls. In court, Coral said she led a loose life in Forest. It was a euphemism for promiscuity, but there were deeper associations Minaker says: a woman “outside the norms of femininity,” independent in a culture that demanded dependence.

Thomas Shay was closest to Coral, and Diane wonders about those visits, and how the family lived with this, how they explained it to their neighbours. “To me it is unbelievable that this went on, and this happened to Coral,” she says.

The Sutherlands talked to family, friends and local history buffs. It was important to them to tell her story, to find out what happened.

“We’ve thrown a lot of theories around, we’ve come up with no solid answers,” Roger Sutherland says.

Sutherland says his other great-aunt, Mabelle, could be difficult. She liked to have her way.

“It gave us a feeling that maybe she was picked on. And the thing about her sister, our family think she might have been one of the reasons the pressure was put on for her to go,” he says.

Deborah Burr, a local genealogist who also scoured the records for Coral, wonders if the story about Coral being sent to a home for unwed mothers in Detroit was muddled over the years. She wonders if Coral was born to an unwed mother, and raised by the Shays. Burr found birth certificates for the older Shay sisters, but not Coral. A search through the birth records of the Ontario Archives also showed no Coral Shay in 1891, the year of her birth.

If she lived to be the same age as her sisters, she would have died around 1970. She does not show up in searches of Ontario or Michigan death records. The closest match was an Amelia Shay, born the same year as Coral, buried in the Lakeshore Asylum cemetery in Toronto. Amelia Shay’s parents, her profession, her relatives weren’t known, so there was possibility in that absence of information, but Amelia Shay’s background was French on her death certificate. Coral Shay’s family was Irish.

“It would really be good to know where her life took her after the Belmont home,” says Diane Sutherland. “You hope she had a good life.”

They have followed all the loose threads, but Coral Shay is nowhere in the official record. She has escaped again.

If you have any information about Coral Shay, please email kdaubs@thestar.ca