It was a chilly, gray springtime, 125 years ago, when Nellie Grant became a little girl lost -- then found.

	Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Three Rivers Youth CEO Peggy Harris, left, with alumni Nadeen Seldon, 20, and Brandon Frazier, 26. Click photo for larger image. If you're going "From Colored Orphans to Youth Development," an exhibition on the history of Three Rivers Youth, will be on display at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center through March 5. Black History Month events

She was plucked up by J.M. Fulton, a socially prominent Presbyterian minister, who spotted her wandering the streets of old Allegheny City.

Her mother dead, her father unknown, the little black girl, about 4 or 5 years old, came to live with the minister and was cared for by his black maid.

The minister's heart was troubled. Because of segregation, there was nowhere in Pittsburgh to care for an abandoned black child. Doors were shut to Nellie.

The pastor took his cause to Julia Blair, a civic leader who immediately took the matter to the Women's Christian Association.

What they formed in 1880 led to a groundbreaking venture, the Home for Colored Children. It was the second of its kind in the nation to provide services for black orphans.

Today, that home has evolved into Three Rivers Youth, a private nonprofit agency that continues to provide services to 3,000 abused, neglected, runaway and homeless youths.

In Pittsburgh, outside of churches and social organizations, the Home for Colored Children is one of few African-American institutions to survive into the 21st century. At 125 years old, it predates the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the national Urban League and the establishment of county services to aid needy children.

Historians say its survival is rooted in its cache of wealthy white Christian leaders. Their generous bequests provided long-term funding and their missionary zeal left them "no ways tired" as they organized a circle of philanthropy that became a model for community giving.

Rarer, still, is that while continuing to aid many black youths, the organization evolved into one that serves the mainstream community.

The transition first happened in 1954, when the Termon Avenue Home, descendant of the Home for Colored Children, began serving children of all backgrounds. But it didn't stop there. In 1970, the home merged with the Girl's Service Club, a residential home for wayward girls founded in 1924 by the Junior League of Pittsburgh. Once united, the two became known as Three Rivers Youth. Today the agency has a staff of 125, which includes counselors, therapists and outreach workers.

The world in which little Nellie Grant was wandering was a rapidly changing post-Reconstruction Pittsburgh. There was a growing black middle class of barbers, ministers and professional caterers.

But it also was a city where new black migrants from the South were struggling. They were coal workers or domestics. In their homes, both parents worked and children had to fend for themselves. It was a time when disconnected youths were generally cared for by extended family, but for poor parents pressed into uncaring boarding houses, it would have been easier for children to fall through the cracks of care.

There were almshouses, or shelters for the poor. Transient, crowded and unsanitary, they were awful places for children.

Like other social projects, the Home for Colored Children benefited from a national wave of progressive charity that roared up near the turn of the century.

Women were re-examining their role in society and creating mission-oriented agencies to address social needs.

When Nellie Grant was found, a white women's Christian society laid the foundation for the colored orphanage, operating it out of a small house in the back of what is now Allegheny General Hospital.

They were women who "really rescued the dire elements of society," said Patricia Pugh Mitchell, a historian who helped write the orphanage's history. "They were persistent, caring, deep-pocketed folks who took [Nellie's] plight to women and they rallied around this initiative."

Over the years, the Home for Colored Children would grow and move several times before establishing itself on six green acres in the Marshall-Shadeland section of the city. Twenty years after it was founded, the 1900 census showed there were 55 children in the home. In the 1940s, the center would get its first black housemother, Ann Jones, and in 1950, its first black social worker, Orlene Ricco, who became the first black executive director.

Woven throughout the agency's history is the organizers' spiritual charisma and dogged devotion, said Ms. Mitchell, the historian. "The welfare of the children really was a heartfelt aim."

Many organizers and board members, in their wills, left money for the agency. In their push for healthier children, they became pioneers.

The home was one of the first to have black board members and to hire black workers to serve as surrogate parents.

"It was groundbreaking what they did," said Peggy Harris, currently chief executive officer of Three Rivers Youth. "They were good people of conscience and they began to believe that the kids should have contact with people who look like them."

By the late 1940s, the home put an emphasis on integrating the children into the community. They went to nearby Bidwell Presbyterian Church; they took classes at the John Morrow School; they joined the Cub Scouts, went to local hospitals for checkups and shopped in local groceries.

"Today, you hear talk about these kind of situations being considered best practices," said Ms. Harris. "We were doing this stuff decades ago."

Over the course of 125 years, an estimated 300,000 children and families have been touched by the organization.

Their lives probably would have been forgotten, except that, about a year ago, the University of Pittsburgh and Three Rivers Youth came together to unpack the history of the orphanage, which was folded away in dozens of cardboard boxes.

When they began looking, the past tumbled out in sepia tones: faded news articles, a century-old ledger, black-and-white photographs.

"This stuff sat in the closet with the dust," said Ms. Harris.

"I think there was some shame attached to us not fully being an open society -- not even to children -- and this reminds us of that time," she said.

But beneath the history, said Robert Hill, Pitt's vice chancellor of public affairs, "is a remarkable story of how the most advantaged people in Pittsburgh society became deeply connected and involved to the least fortunate," he said.

Unlike the industrial millionaires, "they were not Carnegie and Frick, but they were part of an upper-class white society that came to aid this little girl, Nellie Grant, who was black and an orphan."

It reminds us, said Ms. Harris, "that we need each other to fight for racial and social justice and access to quality of life."