Contact:
Francis Ivory
(651) 771-8821
fivory@merrickcs.org

Case Management
Community Events and Celebrations
Emergency Services
Employment Services
Family Programs
Pre-school and Learning Resources
Youth Programs

About Merrick Community Services

Our Story
In 1908, Mr. and Mrs. H. T. Quinlan traveled to Washington D.C. on business. While there, Mrs. Quinlan met a young woman who had been confined to a wheel chair since breaking her back in an accident as a teenager. The young woman was gifted and charismatic, and had launched an enormous project to benefit poor children in D.C. She inspired Mrs. Quinlan to consider ways to address poverty back home in St. Paul. The young woman's name was Mary Virginia Merrick.

Upon her return to St. Paul, Mrs. Quinlan related to a group of friends the vision and work of Ms. Merrick. They were motivated to immediately begin helping those who were less fortunate. Their attention turned to the most recent immigrants to St. Paul, the Italian community on the lower Eastside. There, they built the Christ Child Community Center, which was the forerunner of Merrick Community Services.

Today, Merrick Community Services operates two 25,000-square-foot community centers, two food shelves, and a job bank. It serves the people who live on the Eastside by providing preschool and daycare, parenting classes, counseling services for adults, children and families, emergency assistance, holiday baskets of toys and food, meals on wheels, senior citizen transportation, income tax assistance, and community meeting space.
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Mary Virginia Merrick's legacy of helping others is alive and well on the Eastside through the work of Merrick Community Services.

Mary Virginia Merrick*
Some who know the story of Mary Virginia Merrick compare her to Helen Keller; some say that her story, if told, would forever mean to children what the story of Abraham Lincoln means to the American people. Archbishops have publicly intimated their belief that in years to come, Mary Virginia Merrick may join the ranks of sainthood.

Ms. Merrick spent her entire adult life either in bed or in a wheelchair. She weighed perhaps 80 pounds. Her legs were paralyzed. The upper half of her body was encased in a heavy steel-and-leather jacket, extending up over her broken back to the back of her head.

Despite this, Ms. Merrick not only launched the Christ Child Society - one of the biggest groups of enterprises for the benefit of children in the history of Washington D.C. - but remained the active director until almost 90 years old.**

The word "active" is to be taken with the fullest literalness. From her wheelchair, Ms. Merrick presided at monthly meetings of a 42-member board of directors. She supervised the purchase of everything from a quarter-million-dollar piece of real estate to new footballs.

Miss Merrick has only an honorary degree in the social sciences, but many a professional social worker has stood in awe of the proven success of her methods. One social worker admiringly described her as "one of the sharpest politicians I've ever seen."

Mary Virginia Merrick, the 80-pound woman who, for more than threescore years, never left her bed except to go to her wheelchair, had a way of getting what she wanted - and a good thing it has been, too, for the children of Washington D.C. The children, all questions of sainthood aside, will never forget her.
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* Edited from the Washington Post, Sunday, November 20, 1949.
** Mary Virginia Merrick died in 1955 at age 89