The Orphan Trains

Dark brown eyes and thick, wavy black hair. The girl is beautiful, and it’s the only photo Lee has of a mother he can’t remember. “I guess blocking everything out of my mind is how I got through it.” Even though he was seven years old when she died from complications of childbirth, he can’t remember his mother’s death, though his brother Leo, then four, remembers.

He does remember his father overcome with grief. He tried to care for the seven children, but couldn’t. The three oldest had to leave home and take of themselves. The baby was given to family friends. Somebody else took Gerald, then a year old. Lee has never forgotten what happened to Leo and himself.

Lee and his brother were taken to an orphanage. Two more homeless kids in a country that already had too many. Many of these children had one or both parents still living, but those parents could not care for their children or had abandoned them. Parents who were ill, fathers who were widowed, or mothers who were not married sometimes put their children in orphanages because they had no way to care for them.

Life in the orphanage was hard and hungry and there were too many orphans. Lee thought about running away, but he stayed because his brother was too young to go with him. One day, Lee, Leo and some of the other children were told they were going to ride a train.

Orphan trains like the one Lee was about to board had been operating since 1854. By 1929, when they stopped running, the trains had carried about 200,000 homeless children from the East to new families in the Midwest and South. I read about Lee’s story in Orphan Train Rider by Andrea Warren.

Charles Loring Brace, a minister, started the orphan trains. He had worked in the slums of New York City, and worried about the lack of housing, good food, medical care, and schooling for all the homeless children. In 1853, he started the Children’s Aid Society. As soon as he opened an office in the slums, the children came.

He wrote articles and gave speeches to raise money. He used that money to start programs to “help the children help themselves”. The homeless needed somewhere to live, but Brace didn’t think orphanages were the solution. Children needed good families so they could become adults who could take care of themselves and others. Where would he find families to take so many needy children?

The answer: out West. In 1854, the Children’s Aid Society sent 46 boys and girls to a little town in Michigan. Within a week, every child had a home. Inspired by this success, large groups of children were sent west on what became known as orphan trains.

Lee remembers the excitement and heartache of the trains. Lee did not want a new family and was angry to be taken to a new home. Agents who worked for the Society looked for towns that were interested in having an orphan train stop. They then put up signs and set up a screening committee to find as good a match as possible.

Most placements were successful, though children who were physically or mentally handicapped or just too old were usually left behind. The Midwest was settled largely by white Europeans, and most of the orphan train riders had that heritage. The society knew these children had the best chance of being chosen.

Lee arrived in Texas a bitter, unhappy boy. At first he wanted to run away, but his new family made sure he saw his brothers as often as possible, and he learned to love them deeply, and call them Mom and Dad and mean it. Lee finally found his home

Trains? Planes? Or Automobiles? Drop me an email at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com and let me know. Miss a past column? Visit http://frommyshelf.blogspot .com. Hobo the cat was an orphan that rode the rails. He found his home and you can read all about it in “Hobo Finds A Home”, a children’s book about a cat and his adventures…