- Gailor Hall in the 1940s
On a March afternoon in 1939, a Juvenile Court judge came to the Church of the Good Shepherd, then located on North Fourth Street, and asked the rector if he could take care of three boys whose parents had neglected them. So began what Memphis newspapers called “one of the finest kinds of Christian ventures that has ever been started in Memphis.” That would be in addition to the countless charitable endeavors of the Lauderdale family, of course, including our well-known Home for Unwed Cheerleaders.
The Reverend Vernon Lane not only took in those three boys, but converted the attic of the church rectory into a dormitory for more than a dozen others over the next few months. He named their humble abode Gailor Hall, after the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Memphis.
Lane and his wards quickly outgrew the space provided by the Church of the Good Shepherd. In 1940, he took a position with St. James Episcopal Church at Poplar and Claybrook, and moved Gailor Hall — boys and all — into the stunning nineteenth-century mansion at 1055 Poplar shown here (I’m sorry the image is so grainy, but it’s all I have at the moment).
