The Orphan Train

by Patsy Moyer

They were called "Street Rats" or "Street Arabs"

Diane O’Hara sends this article from the January 21st, 2001 Boston Sunday Globe with the accompanying 1918 photo of a group of children who appear to be under five years of age, most holding a doll or bear. The dolls are probably composition dolls with cloth bodies - perhaps character or mama dolls from that era. In the front row center, one child appears to have an Irish Mail Kid type – a composition doll mounted on a four-wheel cart.

The orphan girls wear plain or print dresses with dropped waists and one little boy in the front appears to have on a Dutch romper. Some of the older girls have big ribbons on their hair. - most all have bangs and bobbed hair. They are wearing ankle high lace shoes. It must have been quite a feat to get them all clean and posed for the photograph. Any survivors of these children photographed, would be over ninety years old.

Homelessness is not just a phenomenon of the of the last twenty-five years. In the 1850s there was massive immigrations to the United States and as many as 30,000 abandoned children lived on the streets of New York wandering aimlessly finding shelter where they could. They were called "Street Rats" or "Street Arabs" because of this nomadic existence – throw away children in a fast growing and changing population. One solution was to send children West to live on farms.

Some were true orphans – their parents had died – others were the victims of parents who threw away their parental responsibility because of illness, accident or addiction. The children survived on the streets by begging, stealing, picking pockets, selling items. As they grew older – the girls would turn to prostitution to survive - a sad future and a sad prospect for a little girl who had been forgotten by her family.

Religious leaders and institutions stepped into the picture and tried to come up with solutions. One of those leaders was Charles Loring Brace, born June 19th, 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut. He went to Yale and the Union Theological Seminar in New York. Reverend Brace and others started the Children’s Aid Society in New York in 1853 in response to the Street Arabs he found in New York. The Society was not able to place all the children locally when Brace heard about a plan tried in Boston in the 1840s where children were sent out West to be placed as indentured servants. Brace did not like the indentured servant part, so he devised the family plan where a child would be placed in a home and treated as part of the family. The family would provide for the child with food, clothing, education and religious training as they would for their own children. The first group went out by train in September of 1854.

In the same era, the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul created the Catholic Charities of New York in 1869 and the New York Foundling Hospital took in abandoned babies. Sister Irene worked with Priests throughout the Midwest to place these children in Catholic families. You might write Sister Irene and ask for a certain type of baby – but all of these children went to Catholic homes.

The Children’s Aid Society advertised in local newspapers in the Midwest and a local committee of religious or civic leaders would meet the train and take the children to a local church or city building and the children would be placed on stage and then chosen.

Prospective parents could apply in advance to be considered. Local residents were named as placing agents and were responsible for keeping track of the orphans. The family did not have to adopt the children and older children were probably chosen to work on the

farm. Sometimes the children were ill treated, but for the time and the area, the Orphan trains as they came to be called worked to take the children off the streets and put them in homes where they had a chance to live, learn and have food. The children could ask to be removed from the homes or the family could ask to have them sent back. Not too bad of an arrangement for 1850s American know-how. Brace died in 1890; the Orphan Trains continued until 1929 and placed an estimated 250,000 children over the 75-year period. With the depression of the 1930s and the passing of new child welfare laws made it impractical to continue the trains.

A big interest in Genealogy and finding your roots has led to many resources about the Orphan Trains. Some states have societies that have websites with information on orphans placed in their states. Growing up in rural Kansas, I checked out the Kansas sites and found lots of information including some first hand accounts of the trips, including one by Connie DiPasquale, granddaughter of an orphan train rider. Some of the accounts are quite moving – children haunted by memories of mothers who had vanished or children who learned as young adults their parents were still alive and well. Some of the stories brought back personal memories of my family.

Sometime during the late 1920s or early 1930s, my paternal grandmother Arizona Mae Ramsey and her husband lived on a small farm in Oklahoma. My grandmother, a stanch Christian, would never turn anyone away from the door who showed up hungry or in need. A man named Stover showed up one day with a small boy, Bobby, who was ill – too ill to travel. The man was going to California to find work. Stover left the boy with my grandmother and said he would come back after him when he could. Stover occasionally would write and the family did keep in touch, but it was never the right time for him to be with them. The boy grew up with my grandmother and I did not know him as anything other than my Uncle Bob. Bob enlisted in the navy during World War II and during his time in the service contacted his family who lived on the East coast. He went on to marry and live his life, but continued to write to my grandmother until she died. Seems strange that happened now, but it was more a matter of necessity back then.

It is not strange to type in Orphan Train in your computer search engine and a wealth of information on the Net becomes available.

Organizations:  For instance there is the Orphan Train Heritance Society of America, 614 East Emma Ave., #115, Springdale, AR, 72764-4634, 501 756-2780. Children’s Aid Society, Office of Closed Records, 150 East 45th Street, New York, NY 10017. New York Foundling Hospital, Department of Closed Records, 590 Avenues of the Americas, New York, NY, 10001.

Videos: PBS produced a documentary on The American Experience "Orphan Trains" by Janet Graham and Edward Gray, 1994. A video movie, "Orphan Train" with Jill Eikenberry, Kevin Dobson and Glenn Close was released in 1979.

Books: Stephen O’Connor wrote the latest book this year, "Orphan Trains", the story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children he saved and failed, 1853-1929. In 1994, Marilyn Irvin Holt wrote, "The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America" now available in paperback. Another resource, "The Orphan Trains" by Annette R. Fry, 1994. The Life and Letters of Charles Loring Brace, 1894, by Emma Brace. In addition there are over four-dozen children’s fiction books available with experiences of the Orphan Train riders.

It is interesting to find that so much of today is not really new. Brace and others worked to solve the problems of homeless children in the 1854-1929 era while today each state has its own child welfare or social services agency, loads of paperwork, investigations and social workers trying to do the same job. We cannot help but be intrigued by the process of the Orphan Trains and the faces of these twenty-six orphans who hopefully found kind parents and loving homes in 1918. And we hope that little children of today will also not be forgotten.  An Orphan train rider, Howard Hurd, writes:

In 1925, my brother Fred Swedenberg and I were removed from our home in Upstate New York because of neglect. I was three and my brother was six.

We went to an orphanage and were later shipped to New York City and placed on a train with several other children and sent to the Midwest to live in a foster home. We were separated and went to different homes at Osceola, Nebraska. He was placed in Clarks Nebraska. I went to Stromsburg Nebraska. We both received good homes. We were lucky. Some children were not so lucky, as some were abused.

There were around 150,000 to 200,000 children who were dispersed in this fashion between 1854 and 1926. We are becoming extinct as all of us are now over the age of 75.

I would like to hear from any other Orphan Train Riders or anyone else interested in this subject. I will answer all correspondence as soon as possible!

Please E-mail me at: handyman28@hamilton.net

Or send me some snail mail at:
Howard Hurd
1009 15th Street
Aurora, NE 68818

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