Eva Nieforth came to the Ideal Maternity Home at East Chester, Nova Scotia, near the end of 1935, unmarried, pregnant, and hoping, like most of the women who arrived there, that nobody at home would find out. She fell ill soon after she got there, went through a long and difficult labor, and died; her newborn died too. Most accounts date the deaths to January 1936, though one gives December 1935. On March 4, 1936, Lila Young, who ran the home and had delivered the child, and her husband, William Peach Young, were charged with two counts of manslaughter. The Crown alleged negligence and unsanitary conditions. After a three-day trial that May, both were acquitted. It was the only time either of them stood trial for a death.
The Youngs had come to the business by way of religion and mail-order credentials. William was a self-styled medical missionary on Nova Scotia's South Shore. In Chicago in 1927 he graduated from the National College of Chiropractic and Lila from the National School of Obstetrics and Midwifery. In February 1928 they opened the Life and Health Sanitarium in a four-bedroom cottage in East Chester, with barely enough money for cots. Lila began delivering babies, and within a year the place was the Ideal Maternity Home and Sanitarium, advertising "NO PUBLICITY" to expectant mothers.
Discretion was what they sold. A woman paid between one hundred and five hundred dollars on arrival for board, delivery and the adoption of her child, twelve dollars more for a layette, and twenty dollars if the baby died, for burial. Those who could not pay worked off the debt at the home. Healthy babies were placed with adoptive couples, many of them in the United States, for fees far beyond what the mothers had paid. Nova Scotia's adoption law was thin, its support for unmarried mothers thinner, and for seventeen years the home operated without a license.
Infants who could not be placed, because they were sick, disabled, or of a skin color the buyers did not want, fared differently. Later accounts, drawn from former staff and mothers, describe them being fed water and molasses and left to waste. The dead were buried in the wooden boxes in which the local dairy delivered butter, which is how the case came to be known in Nova Scotia as the Butterbox Babies. The home's handyman, Glen Shatford, said he buried between one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five babies in a field at Fox Point, where Lila Young had grown up. The home's own reported figures for 1928 to 1935, 148 births and twelve infant deaths, already gave a mortality rate of 8.1 percent against a provincial average of about 3.1.
The provincial government noticed slowly. After the 1933 election the new health minister, Dr. Frank Roy Davis, heard the rumors about deaths at the home and forced the Youngs to hire their first registered nurse. In 1935 they were convicted of fraud for billing a family for the care of a child who was already dead. After the 1936 acquittal Davis ordered the RCMP to look into every known death at the home. In 1942 the Youngs were drawn into an inquest over an adoption. When an amended Maternity Boarding Houses Act required maternity homes to hold a license in 1940, they applied and were refused, and carried on.
An inspection in 1945 found flies in the nurseries, filthy bedding, overcrowding, and infants weighing half what they should have at their age. United States immigration officials complained the same year that babies were being taken across the border. On November 17, 1945, the home was ordered closed. The Youngs kept advertising babies for adoption. Charged on eight counts that included breaches of the Maternity Boarding Houses Act and practicing medicine without a license, they were convicted on three and fined a total of $150; the date is given as March 1945 in some accounts and spring 1946 in others, and a scholarly history counts seven violations in 1946. On June 5, 1946, they were convicted of illegally selling babies to four American couples and fined $428.90. William was later convicted of perjury over his evidence in that case. Children were still being born at the home in early 1947.
What ended the business was a lawsuit the Youngs brought themselves. In 1947 they sued the Montreal Standard Publishing Company for libel over its reporting on the home, claiming twenty-five thousand dollars. The trial put the story on the record in their own name. Pediatricians who had inspected the home testified to "striking overcrowding," fly-filled nurseries and malnourished children. One mother told the court her baby had died without medical attention and been buried in a butter box, and that the Youngs had told her to pose as a nurse during a health department inspection. The suit was dismissed. The couple reopened the property as a rest home for the elderly, calling it the Battle Creek of Nova Scotia, and when that failed, deep in debt, they sold up and moved to Quebec. Lila Young died in 1967.
How many children died at East Chester has never been established. Estimates in the Nova Scotia literature run from four hundred to six hundred over nineteen years, a figure that includes some mothers. No systematic exhumation was ever carried out, much of the adoption paperwork was destroyed or falsified, and no register of the dead exists. The courts that heard the case punished the Youngs for trading without a license and for selling children across a border. None of them ever found that she had killed anyone.