A three-day-old baby girl was found abandoned on the cold marble floor of a restroom at Washington’s Union Station in January 1930.
The infant, dressed in fine white clothing and wrapped in blankets, carried nothing that revealed who she was or where she had come from.
After being discovered by Western Union operator Mae K. Schwartsman, she was taken to Children’s Hospital, where nurses found her suffering from exposure, malnutrition, and a cold likely contracted while she lay in the drafty station.
Hospital staff gave the unidentified child a name, “Mary Margaret O’Brien,” while detectives began searching for her parents.
Her discovery was especially troubling because she was reportedly the fourth baby abandoned in Washington in just four weeks.
Deserted Baby Ill of Cold
WASHINGTON, D.C. — “Mary Margaret O’Brien,” the latest abandoned child is at Children’s Hospital suffering from exposure and malnutrition, while detective headquarters, spurred on by the fourth abandonment in as many weeks, seeks its parents.
The three-day old girl, wrapped in blankets, and dressed in fine white clothes, had no marks of identification about it when Miss Mae K. Schwartsman, a Western Union operator, found the baby in the woman’s restroom at Union Station.
Nurses at Children’s Hospital said the baby had contracted a cold, probably while lying on a marble floor in a cold, drafty spot.
Source: The Washington Times. Washington, D.C. January 13, 1930.
