May 19, 2014 • 31 mins
Between 1854 and 1929, about 250,000 children in the U.S. were taken to new families by train. Except ... they weren't called "orphan trains" at the time, the children weren't all orphans, and "family" didn't always factor into it. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Chacy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are drawing straight from the listener requests again. So is
(00:21):
another one that has been requested many, many, many times.
It is orphan trains. If you have never heard of
orphan trains before, this probably sounds to you like trains
full of orphans being taken to new homes. Just kind
of correct. Between eighteen fifty four and ninety nine, about
two hundred and fifty thousand children were taken to new
(00:45):
families by train, except they weren't really called orphan trains
at all at the time. A lot of the children
were not actually orphans, and a lot of times these
families who were taking them in were more like employers.
So that is a story that we're going to tell today. Uh,
And to get kind of some groundwork, lad We're going
(01:06):
to start with the context of the situation. After the
end of the War of eighteen twelve, the population of
the United States, and particularly in the eastern ports cities,
really exploded. For example, about forty thou people lived in
New York and eighteen hundred and by nineteen hundreds, of
just a hundred years later, it was close to a
million and a half. So many of these new residents
(01:30):
were desperately poor and very sick, having arrived with basically
nothing from wherever they were immigrating from. UH and depending
on where they were immigrating from, they often faced a
lot of prejudice and discrimination, which made it harder for
them to find work and get on their feet. As
a consequence of this influx of people and poverty, the
(01:53):
US saw the rise of its first slums. Poverty has
had always existed, but now there were entire neighborhood that
were really destitute. They had high crime rates, the buildings
were deteriorating, and the circumstances were just apparently hopeless. And
that was the prevailing scenario, and an alarming number of
the people who lived in these neighborhoods were children. Some
(02:15):
of the children really were orphans uh some had at
least one living parent who for whatever reason couldn't or
didn't support them, but regardless, by the mid eighteen hundreds,
there were somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand homeless
children living in the slums of New York City, which
at that point only had the whole city only had
(02:38):
a total population of five hundred thousand people, so that's
a pretty significant chunk of the population that are homeless
street children. In New York and other cities, children formed
gangs to try to keep themselves safe and supported themselves
through petty theft and other crime, or even through begging.
(02:58):
Others would find work in fact trees or as newsboys
or shoeshine boys, and some sold matches or rags on
street corners and in some cases became prostitutes because they
kind of wandered like nomads through the city. People referred
to these children often as street arabs, and this all
kind of calls up images of like scrooges, street urgins
(03:21):
or Oliver twist Um, and for a lot of children,
that's pretty much how it really was. And when then
were the resources to handle them, cities resorted to incarcerating
children in workhouses and prisons that had been meant for adults,
but eventually they would build prisons and asylums for juveniles,
which were really not much better. The field of social
(03:44):
work also barely, if at all, existed at this point.
We've done a previous series of podcasts on Jane Adams,
who thought of as the mother of social work. She
started doing her groundbreaking work kind of in the middle
of when all of this was going on. So there
was you know, if if law enforcement found a child
(04:05):
who was in danger, there it wasn't like there was
a social worker or a department of social services they
could call for help. There was also no foster care system.
Foster care itself did exist, but it was in a
very informal way, with individual families taking on children in need,
and in that sense, fostering has really existed for as
long as families have. But there was no organized system
(04:27):
for placing children in foster families or for screening potential
foster parents. And there were also virtually no adoption laws
in the United States at this point. The first adoption
law passed in the US was in Massachusetts and that
was past an eighteen fifty one. But other than that,
there was, you know, before that point, there was no
(04:47):
legal governance about how one made it official that this
child was now part of your family. So, as a
result of all of this and all of these sort
of gaps in uh a social way to deal with
all these children. Homeless children were a huge issue in
many cities, particularly port cities, and the government's in question
(05:09):
just didn't have the resources or programs that they would
need to do much about it. This brings us to
Charles Loring Brace of Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Presbyterian
from a middle class family, and he moved to New
York City in eighteen forty eight so he could go
to seminary. He was really horrified at this situation with
homeless and orphaned children. And it was not just because
(05:33):
what was happening to these children was horrifying. It was
also because he thought that these hordes of unsupervised, marauding
children were a threat to the social order. His opinion
was that these kids who didn't have families and were
kind of left up to their own devices and were
often making ends meet for themselves through petty theft and
(05:53):
other crime. Uh, he just thought they were gonna gonna
grow up into hardened criminal adults, and he became really
fixated on them. He would go exploring through the city's
poorest neighborhoods and interview them and record their conversations in
a journal, and he became really motivated to try to
find some way to take care of this problem of
(06:14):
homeless children left alone to do as they will. In
March of eighteen fifty three, he started the Children's Aid Society,
and the first programs of the Children's Aid Society were
Sunday School and vocational training, and the society also started
the United States first home for runaways, the Newsboys Lodging House.
(06:36):
Almost immediately though, the Children's Aid Society was just overrun
with demand. There were not enough jobs or enough money
to provide the services that these children really needed. Um.
You know, at this point in history, it was pretty
normal for children to work in some way. And while
they were trying to match up children with jobs, the
(06:57):
children vastly outnumbered the jobs. Uh. And they did not
have the funding to to do more to really help.
And Brace wanted to do more, But he didn't just
want to build more facilities to handle more children. He
thought prisons and asylums were the wrong approach. In his words, quote,
(07:17):
the best of all asylums for the outcast child is
the farmers home. The great duty is to get these
children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and
to send them away. To kind Christian homes in the country.
This is kind of alludes to the plan that Brace
came up with, which he called the Immigration Plan. This
(07:38):
was that they would gather up children from New York
who were homeless or whose parents couldn't care for them,
and they would send them west to work on farms.
This became known as outplacement. So you're placing children out
versus placing them into an orphanage or an institution. He
didn't exactly invent the idea of outplacement, uh. The This
(08:02):
act of like placing children out with other families existed before,
but the Children's Aid Society and Brace's influence on it
really became the biggest and most well known outplacement effort.
So the Children's Aid Society turned its focus to raising
money and working through all of the legal requirements involved
(08:23):
in finding new homes for children, and to finding the
children to send, sometimes working directly with the birth parents themselves.
As the Children's Aid Society started sending the children out
on trains and the program really started to take off,
other agencies followed suit and they placed children from other
major cities in the Northeast elsewhere in the United States
(08:45):
and Before we talk about what exactly was happening with
these trains, let's take a moment for a brief word
from a sponsor. So let's take a look at what
was going on with the orphans and the trains. So,
before being put on the trains, these children would be
given new clothes or put into their best clothes if
they had clothes that were serviceable. Often this meant that
(09:06):
they were in a new outfit that had been provided
to them by charity. They were meant to look their best,
but depending on how long and difficult the journey was,
sometimes what really happened was by the time they arrived
they were filthy and sick. Someone representing the agency usually
went on the train with them, and often another agent
(09:26):
had gone ahead to spread the word and begin screening
potential parents and assembling a committee of local people, which
usually included doctors and clergy to help with the approvals.
Agencies would also distribute leaflets and place advertisements about the children.
Here's an example of an ad that ran in Nebraska.
In all children received under the care of this association
(09:49):
are of special promise in intelligence and health, and are
in age from one month to twelve years and are
sent free to those receiving them on ninety days trial
unless a special contract as otherwise made. Homes are wanted
for the following children. Eight boys, ages ten, six and
four years English parents. Blondes very promising two years old, blonde,
(10:11):
fine looking, healthy American, has had his foot straightened, walks
now okay. Six years old, dark hair and eyes, good looking,
at intelligent American. Ten babies boys and girls from one
month to three months. One boy. Baby has fine head
and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty three
months old. Agencies also had rules for the placements themselves.
(10:34):
Here's the Children's Aid Society rule for the placement of boys.
Applications must be endorsed by the local committee. Boys under
fifteen years of age, if not legally adopted, must be
retained as members of the family and sent to school
according to the educational laws of the state until they
are eighteen years old. Suitable provisions must then be made
(10:54):
for their future. Boys between fifteen and sixteen years of
age must be retained as members of the family and
sent to school during the winter months until they're seventeen
years old, when a mutual arrangement may be made. Boys
over sixteen years of age must be retained as members
of the family for one year, after which a mutual
arrangement may be made. Parties taking boys agree to write
(11:16):
to the society at least once a year, or to
have the boys do so. Removals of boys providing unsatisfactory
can be arranged through the local committee or an agent
of the society, the party agreeing to retain the boy
a reasonable length of time after notifying the society of
the desired change. This kind of reminds me of, uh,
(11:36):
when you get a pet through pet rescue, Like yeah, yeah.
And obviously this particular set of rules is from after
states that started to pass abaction laws, which was actually
done in part to kind of curtail the more willy
nilly aspects of this placement of children that was going on. Um.
(11:57):
When the train arrived at a town, the children would
be taken to a playhouse or a theater or some
other suitable gathering place that had places for spectators and
places to display the children, and the children will be
paraded across the stage for the families to inspect. And
so the term up for adoption purportedly comes from this
(12:19):
practice of literally putting the children up on stage, and
often the whole town would come to watch whether they
wanted a child or not. Sometimes the children would be
asked to say something or perform in some way, and
the prospective families would ask questions of them and sometimes
inspect them in a way that was more reminiscent of
(12:39):
buying a horse or a slave. In some towns, demand
for these children was really huge, and families would almost
come to blows over who could pick from the limited
number of children. Foster families were supposed to have references
from their pastor or the justice of the peace attesting
to their character, but if none was available, the agent
(13:01):
in charge would often just judge based on their appearance,
their dress, and their demeanor. Children who couldn't find a
placement would be put back on the train to be
sent on to the next town, or, failing that, would
wind up in a local orphanage or some other local
facility for homeless children. For most agencies, the record keeping
was pretty lax um, The screening was pretty minimal, and
(13:24):
depending on who you asked, these people taking in children
could be considered parents or they could be considered more
like employers. There was also not a lot of follow
up after the facts. Travel was really difficult and expensive
at this point, which became a big deterrent against sending
representatives from the agencies to check up on people. Uh.
Some of them, like the Children's Aid Society, had planned
(13:47):
initially to do in person follow ups on a regular basis,
but that never really came to fruition uh. And that
pretty much meant that they were relying on the families
or the childre are in to send letters back to
the agency, which also sometimes happened and sometimes not. And
although most of the agencies that were kind of doing
(14:09):
these sorts of projects of out placing children followed similar methods,
the Children's Aid Society really got some particular criticisms, and
we're going to talk about those after we have a
quick word from our sponsor. So a lot of agencies,
not just the Children's Aid Society, got involved in sending
children out west or to some other place by train. Um.
(14:32):
Charles Loring Brace in particular, though, had some aspects to
what he was doing in his philosophy that are kind
of problematic. He was really sure that farms were the
best places for New York's impoverished children. They would get
used to doing honest work there, and they would ideally
have the affection and support of a family. And this
(14:54):
I mean it sounds like an at least well meaning
plan on the surface, but there are aspects of it
that are pretty problematic. Fewer than half of the children
that were sent on the trains by the Children's Aid
Society were actually orphans. Roughly a quarter of them had
one living parent, and about a quarter had both parents
(15:15):
still living, so fifty of them had some parents in
the mix. Arguably the living parents couldn't afford to or
didn't want to raise their children, or the children were
being abused, neglected, or mishandled in some way. Some were
also teenagers who were making the step to leave home
themselves with the aid of this free passage and clothing
(15:36):
and work help that would come without placements. Yeah. I
did not find horror stories of like children being taken
with no regard to their parents, but I did find
ones where the parents were pressured pretty extensively to give
up their children for their better good, you know, based
on the person who was speaking to them's idea of
(15:59):
what would be best for them. Um. His critics argued
that Brace was really taking it upon himself to dictate
what was best for these children, regardless of the parents
feelings or their actual situation. And as a side note,
the existence of parents for about half of these children
is one reason why the phrase orphan trains wasn't really
(16:22):
used at the time. The more common terms for the
setup were mercy trains and even baby trains. So one
of brace's actual stated goals was also to provide labor
and the less popular populated regions of the United States
where people were moving. Uh you know, there were new
families who were getting out to somewhere in the West,
(16:44):
and uh, you know, in a typical situation, they probably
would eventually have children, and the children were eventually helped
them on the fire. But they needed that child like
that child help now. Um. So for this reason, most
of the Children's Eights Society's children were between six and fourteen,
so they were old enough to do work, but young
(17:04):
enough to still be like trained and educated and maybe
not so said in their ways and and obstinate as
to cause problems for their new families. BRACE also definitely
had some monetary motivations, pointing out how much cheaper it
was to place children out than to put them into institutions.
(17:25):
And the last one is something that he denied, but
a lot of people pointed out a lot of the
children who went on Children's Aid Society trains were Catholic
or Jewish, and a lot of them were also Italian,
Polish or Irish, and these were all groups who faced
massive amounts of prejudice and discrimination. Um, Italian, Polish and
Irish people were all viewed as like second class and
(17:47):
inferior citizens. The families who received these children were mostly Protestant,
and they were mostly not Italian or Polish or Irish,
and so critics argued that Brace was trying to kind
of strip these children of their religion and their heritage
and to force them to assimilate to the culture that
he thought was the best one. Um. His like this
(18:10):
was sort of the response of him being like nah,
and his critics being like, yuh huh, Like it does
seem a little uh, a little problematic. That that was
that was generally how it went. He would say, well,
but they're they're just aren't as many you know, non
Protestant people out west, That's why. And people would say,
(18:32):
I don't really buy your argument. It definitely, like the
data set does sort of support a certain prejudice going
into it. The Children's Aid Society also did not work
with African American children, although exactly why this is the
case is not really clear. There were definitely fewer African
American homes in the West that could have taken the children.
(18:55):
But it's also possible that this whole exercise looked way
too much like slavery for anybody to be comfortable sending
black children. Or it's also very possible that racists did
not want that to be part of the system. Yeah,
nobody really clearly said why they were not working with
African American children. Some of the other outplacement organizations, seeing
(19:16):
what Brace was doing and seeing the flaws that people
were pointing out in his plan, tried to avoid the
controversies that he was generating. So, for example, the New
York Foundling Hospital was a Catholic organization, and it's since children,
including babies and toddlers, a lot of babies and toddler's
actually exclusively to Catholic homes. The Boston Home for a
(19:36):
Little Wanderers also claims that it's screening and follow up
processes were much more exact and stringent than BRACES. Were
so um. While the Children's Aid Society was the most
well known, there were a lot of other organizations that
were into this whole practice, and some of them, either
by their own claims or by actual documentation, seemed to
(19:57):
have taken more deliberate care with the whole process. Yeah,
and while the Children's Aid Society was mostly sending children
out to rural farming communities, the New York Foundling Hospital
and other agencies replacing children much closer to home. So
many of the children who were placed during this time
actually stayed in New York, contrary to the perception that
(20:18):
they all went west. And some of the other agencies
were definitely more oriented towards children's welfare and not so
much with the providing labor aspect of it. So this
whole phenomenon of the trains and outplacement it really hinged
upon assuming the best in people. So everybody was assuming
that the parents who were surrendering their children generally were
(20:41):
doing so because they thought it was in the children's
best interests uh. And everybody sort of assumed that the
parents who were taking in these children really were doing
so out of love and charity and not just to
get free labor. But in reality, of course, people are
not always doing their best, and when it comes to
what happened to the children that were involved, it's really
something of a mixed bag. Some found themselves genuinely in
(21:04):
happy homes, when they were loved and cared for, as
though they were a member of the family, working alongside
other siblings on farms or in family businesses. The whole
practice had its share of horror stories too, though they
were definitely children who were abused, one whose foster families
took them on strictly to act as unpaid manual labor.
(21:24):
There were family members who were separated one another, separated
from one another, and and the like. There are lots
and lots of surviving letters and diaries that tell of
children whose parents sent of a way with notes that
contained their names and their addresses so that they could
come back home eventually and stay in touch, only for
these notes to be taken away from the children by
(21:47):
placement agents as they slept on the trains. That's so heartbreaking, uh.
There are also many, many first person accounts of children
who just did not know or understand what was happening
to them. Some were too young to really grasp the situation,
and others were simply never told what was going on,
and in at least some cases, parents seem to have
(22:07):
been pressured, as Tracy mentioned earlier, into surrendering their children
when they didn't really want or possibly even need to.
Outplaced children also did not necessarily get a warm welcome
in their new communities. A lot of people viewed the
trained children as they were called, with suspicions. Surely they
must have been of poor character or have come from
(22:29):
bad families. There were also religious and cultural tensions as
Catholic children were placed with Protestant families, and as we
were speaking earlier speaking about earlier ethnic tensions with Irish
and Polish and Italian children who were placed into communities
that carried prejudices against all of these people, all of
these nationalities. So sometimes, you know, somebody, a child would
(22:55):
leave a situation where they were homeless and begging out
the streets, and they would wind up in the situation
where they had food and shelter, but were outcast and
faced derision from the community. And there were also cases
where foster parents had taken in these children and they
truly loved them and you know, raised them as their own,
and they lived in this sort of constant fear that
(23:15):
someone was going to come and take their child away
from them someday. There was finally an independent investigation of
the Children's Aid Society in eighteen eighty three, and it
found that there was very little screening of the prospective
parents and very little supervision of the overall process. A
significant number of the older boys who had been outplaced
(23:36):
had later run away from home, But overall, the investigators
found that for the most part, the children under the
age of fourteen who had been outplaced by the Children's
Aid Society we're doing okay. Outplaced as a child. Andrew
Burke became governor of North Dakota and John Brady became
governor of Alaska. They had both been sent to the
(23:57):
same town in Indiana on the same day, and the
man who adopted John Brady had actually been a judge there.
Because records weren't kept very well, while we do have,
you know, stories about what some of his children grew
up to be, a lot of times the children who
had been placed out lost all track of their birth
families if those families still lived, and so in you know,
(24:19):
more recent years, their children and grandchildren have been trying
to trace down the family genealogy and just have been
unable to figure out where their parents or grandparents came
from before they got on the train. The last train
ran on May thirty one, nine, carrying three children to
Sulfur Springs, Texas. And there were several things that kind
(24:40):
of worked altogether to really bring an end to this
UH approach to outplacement. One was at the Great Depression
made the trains financially unsustainable UH, and people began to
focus more on local outplacement of children. Prior to that,
the trains had gone nearly to every state included in
as well as Canada in Mexico. But also a big
(25:02):
factor in it was that social agencies had started focusing
on trying to keep children with their birth families wherever
that was possible. The agencies that had been part of
the orphan train movement later morphed into adoption and foster
care agencies as we think of them today, and Brace's
idea that children are better off in homes than in
institutions continues to be at the heart of today's foster
(25:25):
care programs. This movement is often credited for spawning the
foster care system as we know it today, and many
states adoption laws were put on the books in an
effort to rain in Brace's seemingly haphazard placement of children
with families. A lot of the news articles that you
will see about the Orphan Trains the American Heritage series
(25:47):
that was are the American Heritage uh TV show installment
that was about the Orphan Trains. Most of these are
from the mid nineties nineties, as the last writers of
the Orphan Trains were getting into their eighties and nineties,
so very few, if any, of the people who were
placed out on the trains survived today. But fortunately in
in the eighties and nineties, people did a lot of
(26:09):
documentation of like oral histories and first person accounts and
talking to people who had ridden on the trains and
been placed with the new family about their experiences. Today,
the Orphan Train Complex and other Orphan Train historical and
heritage societies trying to keep the movement documented and help
the descendants of children's who road to trains connect to
one another. So a whole lot of people have asked
(26:32):
us to talk about orphan trains. It's fascinating it well,
and it turned out to be a whole lot more
layered than what I knew of it going into it.
I basically knew the orphan trains. They took orphans on
trains to get new families, and that is pretty reductive. Yeah. Well,
and it's one of those things that there are a
lot of complex angles to it, Like wow, the initial
(26:53):
impetus for it was surely like a good intent, you
know it it ended up doing some not so great things,
but also had some legacies that were good. Yeah. Well,
and I think one of the things that uh may
not have occurred to anyone, or it might not have
been nearly as much common knowledge at the time, there
have definitely been efforts in multiple places in the world
(27:16):
two place minority children with majority families in an effort
to make them assimilate. Um. And while that was not
the like specified intention of any of the agencies that
were running orphan trains, it did have a little bit
of that flavor, which is troubling. Yeah, it's a like
(27:39):
I said, good and bad, some good legacy, some very
unfortunate circumstances. But do you have a spot of listener
mail for us? It is from Valerie. Valerie says hey,
Holly and Tracy. I was so excited to hear the
Pueblo Revolt episode. I, along with others, I am sure,
sent in a request for so long ago. I spent
a lot of time as a kid learning about that
(28:00):
time period outside of school. Growing up in Santa Fe
with my dad. Curating a Navajo museum has affected my
life in so many ways. Things like spending a couple
of weeks one winter living in a hogan is not
part of everyone's childhood. There's a favorite story that my
friend of my dad's told us that I thought you
guys might enjoy. Two of the artists my dad met
through the museum used to give tours around the Peblos
(28:22):
around Arizona and New Mexico. They were getting off the
bus with a group at a Hopie village. They walked
up to the village and there was a large sign
asking the visitors to respect the laws of this area
since it is an independent nation. The first on the
list was no photography. A lady in the group was
taking pictures of the sign, saying photography wasn't allowed. They
(28:42):
asked her to stop and not take any pictures. The
woman responded that they should have told her if they
really meant it. I wonder if they put up a
secondary part of the sign that said no, we really
mean it. Oh yeah, so that's that's a gonna get to.
This was so surprising to them that it became kind
(29:03):
of a joke phrase ending states, statements and requests with
and I really mean it. They even began to use
the acronym A W R M I and we really
mean it etched into the jury they made as part
of the identification marks. Uh. That cracked me up. That
is so every few podcast there's one that I know
(29:24):
some of the basic information because of a board game
I had played based on that time period. Most recently,
I played a game themed to being dressmakers in the
French Court a little before the time period of Rose Berton.
I ended up winning the game, and like the thing,
knowing about Rose gave me an edge. I also have
a game called voc about running ships as the Dutch
(29:44):
East India Company. I think that if I studied all
the themes of the games I played, I could probably
become a history buff. And then Valerie has an episode suggestion.
I wanted to read this in part because the the
and I really mean its story made me laugh so hard. Uh,
And because I love having board games that have some
kind of nod to history somehow or tie into history
(30:06):
in subway. Um, we have a giant board game closet,
several of which have some kind of historical high end
or theme. UM like Carcasson is one where you make
a French town. It's pretty awesome. So thank you, Valerie.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Our Facebook
(30:28):
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history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on pinterrestt
pinterest dot com slash missed in History. Our very own
website is that missed in history dot com. And if
you would like to learn more about what we've talked
about today, you can come to our parent website, how
(30:48):
stuff Works dot com, and you can put in the
word adoption in the search bar and you will find
how adoption works. You can learn all about that and
a whole lot more at our website, which is how
stuff works dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics.
Because of how stuff Works dot com in
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Chacy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are drawing straight from the listener requests again. So is
(00:21):
another one that has been requested many, many, many times.
It is orphan trains. If you have never heard of
orphan trains before, this probably sounds to you like trains
full of orphans being taken to new homes. Just kind
of correct. Between eighteen fifty four and ninety nine, about
two hundred and fifty thousand children were taken to new
(00:45):
families by train, except they weren't really called orphan trains
at all at the time. A lot of the children
were not actually orphans, and a lot of times these
families who were taking them in were more like employers.
So that is a story that we're going to tell today. Uh,
And to get kind of some groundwork, lad We're going
(01:06):
to start with the context of the situation. After the
end of the War of eighteen twelve, the population of
the United States, and particularly in the eastern ports cities,
really exploded. For example, about forty thou people lived in
New York and eighteen hundred and by nineteen hundreds, of
just a hundred years later, it was close to a
million and a half. So many of these new residents
(01:30):
were desperately poor and very sick, having arrived with basically
nothing from wherever they were immigrating from. UH and depending
on where they were immigrating from, they often faced a
lot of prejudice and discrimination, which made it harder for
them to find work and get on their feet. As
a consequence of this influx of people and poverty, the
(01:53):
US saw the rise of its first slums. Poverty has
had always existed, but now there were entire neighborhood that
were really destitute. They had high crime rates, the buildings
were deteriorating, and the circumstances were just apparently hopeless. And
that was the prevailing scenario, and an alarming number of
the people who lived in these neighborhoods were children. Some
(02:15):
of the children really were orphans uh some had at
least one living parent who for whatever reason couldn't or
didn't support them, but regardless, by the mid eighteen hundreds,
there were somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand homeless
children living in the slums of New York City, which
at that point only had the whole city only had
(02:38):
a total population of five hundred thousand people, so that's
a pretty significant chunk of the population that are homeless
street children. In New York and other cities, children formed
gangs to try to keep themselves safe and supported themselves
through petty theft and other crime, or even through begging.
(02:58):
Others would find work in fact trees or as newsboys
or shoeshine boys, and some sold matches or rags on
street corners and in some cases became prostitutes because they
kind of wandered like nomads through the city. People referred
to these children often as street arabs, and this all
kind of calls up images of like scrooges, street urgins
(03:21):
or Oliver twist Um, and for a lot of children,
that's pretty much how it really was. And when then
were the resources to handle them, cities resorted to incarcerating
children in workhouses and prisons that had been meant for adults,
but eventually they would build prisons and asylums for juveniles,
which were really not much better. The field of social
(03:44):
work also barely, if at all, existed at this point.
We've done a previous series of podcasts on Jane Adams,
who thought of as the mother of social work. She
started doing her groundbreaking work kind of in the middle
of when all of this was going on. So there
was you know, if if law enforcement found a child
(04:05):
who was in danger, there it wasn't like there was
a social worker or a department of social services they
could call for help. There was also no foster care system.
Foster care itself did exist, but it was in a
very informal way, with individual families taking on children in need,
and in that sense, fostering has really existed for as
long as families have. But there was no organized system
(04:27):
for placing children in foster families or for screening potential
foster parents. And there were also virtually no adoption laws
in the United States at this point. The first adoption
law passed in the US was in Massachusetts and that
was past an eighteen fifty one. But other than that,
there was, you know, before that point, there was no
(04:47):
legal governance about how one made it official that this
child was now part of your family. So, as a
result of all of this and all of these sort
of gaps in uh a social way to deal with
all these children. Homeless children were a huge issue in
many cities, particularly port cities, and the government's in question
(05:09):
just didn't have the resources or programs that they would
need to do much about it. This brings us to
Charles Loring Brace of Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Presbyterian
from a middle class family, and he moved to New
York City in eighteen forty eight so he could go
to seminary. He was really horrified at this situation with
homeless and orphaned children. And it was not just because
(05:33):
what was happening to these children was horrifying. It was
also because he thought that these hordes of unsupervised, marauding
children were a threat to the social order. His opinion
was that these kids who didn't have families and were
kind of left up to their own devices and were
often making ends meet for themselves through petty theft and
(05:53):
other crime. Uh, he just thought they were gonna gonna
grow up into hardened criminal adults, and he became really
fixated on them. He would go exploring through the city's
poorest neighborhoods and interview them and record their conversations in
a journal, and he became really motivated to try to
find some way to take care of this problem of
(06:14):
homeless children left alone to do as they will. In
March of eighteen fifty three, he started the Children's Aid Society,
and the first programs of the Children's Aid Society were
Sunday School and vocational training, and the society also started
the United States first home for runaways, the Newsboys Lodging House.
(06:36):
Almost immediately though, the Children's Aid Society was just overrun
with demand. There were not enough jobs or enough money
to provide the services that these children really needed. Um.
You know, at this point in history, it was pretty
normal for children to work in some way. And while
they were trying to match up children with jobs, the
(06:57):
children vastly outnumbered the jobs. Uh. And they did not
have the funding to to do more to really help.
And Brace wanted to do more, But he didn't just
want to build more facilities to handle more children. He
thought prisons and asylums were the wrong approach. In his words, quote,
(07:17):
the best of all asylums for the outcast child is
the farmers home. The great duty is to get these
children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and
to send them away. To kind Christian homes in the country.
This is kind of alludes to the plan that Brace
came up with, which he called the Immigration Plan. This
(07:38):
was that they would gather up children from New York
who were homeless or whose parents couldn't care for them,
and they would send them west to work on farms.
This became known as outplacement. So you're placing children out
versus placing them into an orphanage or an institution. He
didn't exactly invent the idea of outplacement, uh. The This
(08:02):
act of like placing children out with other families existed before,
but the Children's Aid Society and Brace's influence on it
really became the biggest and most well known outplacement effort.
So the Children's Aid Society turned its focus to raising
money and working through all of the legal requirements involved
(08:23):
in finding new homes for children, and to finding the
children to send, sometimes working directly with the birth parents themselves.
As the Children's Aid Society started sending the children out
on trains and the program really started to take off,
other agencies followed suit and they placed children from other
major cities in the Northeast elsewhere in the United States
(08:45):
and Before we talk about what exactly was happening with
these trains, let's take a moment for a brief word
from a sponsor. So let's take a look at what
was going on with the orphans and the trains. So,
before being put on the trains, these children would be
given new clothes or put into their best clothes if
they had clothes that were serviceable. Often this meant that
(09:06):
they were in a new outfit that had been provided
to them by charity. They were meant to look their best,
but depending on how long and difficult the journey was,
sometimes what really happened was by the time they arrived
they were filthy and sick. Someone representing the agency usually
went on the train with them, and often another agent
(09:26):
had gone ahead to spread the word and begin screening
potential parents and assembling a committee of local people, which
usually included doctors and clergy to help with the approvals.
Agencies would also distribute leaflets and place advertisements about the children.
Here's an example of an ad that ran in Nebraska.
In all children received under the care of this association
(09:49):
are of special promise in intelligence and health, and are
in age from one month to twelve years and are
sent free to those receiving them on ninety days trial
unless a special contract as otherwise made. Homes are wanted
for the following children. Eight boys, ages ten, six and
four years English parents. Blondes very promising two years old, blonde,
(10:11):
fine looking, healthy American, has had his foot straightened, walks
now okay. Six years old, dark hair and eyes, good looking,
at intelligent American. Ten babies boys and girls from one
month to three months. One boy. Baby has fine head
and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty three
months old. Agencies also had rules for the placements themselves.
(10:34):
Here's the Children's Aid Society rule for the placement of boys.
Applications must be endorsed by the local committee. Boys under
fifteen years of age, if not legally adopted, must be
retained as members of the family and sent to school
according to the educational laws of the state until they
are eighteen years old. Suitable provisions must then be made
(10:54):
for their future. Boys between fifteen and sixteen years of
age must be retained as members of the family and
sent to school during the winter months until they're seventeen
years old, when a mutual arrangement may be made. Boys
over sixteen years of age must be retained as members
of the family for one year, after which a mutual
arrangement may be made. Parties taking boys agree to write
(11:16):
to the society at least once a year, or to
have the boys do so. Removals of boys providing unsatisfactory
can be arranged through the local committee or an agent
of the society, the party agreeing to retain the boy
a reasonable length of time after notifying the society of
the desired change. This kind of reminds me of, uh,
(11:36):
when you get a pet through pet rescue, Like yeah, yeah.
And obviously this particular set of rules is from after
states that started to pass abaction laws, which was actually
done in part to kind of curtail the more willy
nilly aspects of this placement of children that was going on. Um.
(11:57):
When the train arrived at a town, the children would
be taken to a playhouse or a theater or some
other suitable gathering place that had places for spectators and
places to display the children, and the children will be
paraded across the stage for the families to inspect. And
so the term up for adoption purportedly comes from this
(12:19):
practice of literally putting the children up on stage, and
often the whole town would come to watch whether they
wanted a child or not. Sometimes the children would be
asked to say something or perform in some way, and
the prospective families would ask questions of them and sometimes
inspect them in a way that was more reminiscent of
(12:39):
buying a horse or a slave. In some towns, demand
for these children was really huge, and families would almost
come to blows over who could pick from the limited
number of children. Foster families were supposed to have references
from their pastor or the justice of the peace attesting
to their character, but if none was available, the agent
(13:01):
in charge would often just judge based on their appearance,
their dress, and their demeanor. Children who couldn't find a
placement would be put back on the train to be
sent on to the next town, or, failing that, would
wind up in a local orphanage or some other local
facility for homeless children. For most agencies, the record keeping
was pretty lax um, The screening was pretty minimal, and
(13:24):
depending on who you asked, these people taking in children
could be considered parents or they could be considered more
like employers. There was also not a lot of follow
up after the facts. Travel was really difficult and expensive
at this point, which became a big deterrent against sending
representatives from the agencies to check up on people. Uh.
Some of them, like the Children's Aid Society, had planned
(13:47):
initially to do in person follow ups on a regular basis,
but that never really came to fruition uh. And that
pretty much meant that they were relying on the families
or the childre are in to send letters back to
the agency, which also sometimes happened and sometimes not. And
although most of the agencies that were kind of doing
(14:09):
these sorts of projects of out placing children followed similar methods,
the Children's Aid Society really got some particular criticisms, and
we're going to talk about those after we have a
quick word from our sponsor. So a lot of agencies,
not just the Children's Aid Society, got involved in sending
children out west or to some other place by train. Um.
(14:32):
Charles Loring Brace in particular, though, had some aspects to
what he was doing in his philosophy that are kind
of problematic. He was really sure that farms were the
best places for New York's impoverished children. They would get
used to doing honest work there, and they would ideally
have the affection and support of a family. And this
(14:54):
I mean it sounds like an at least well meaning
plan on the surface, but there are aspects of it
that are pretty problematic. Fewer than half of the children
that were sent on the trains by the Children's Aid
Society were actually orphans. Roughly a quarter of them had
one living parent, and about a quarter had both parents
(15:15):
still living, so fifty of them had some parents in
the mix. Arguably the living parents couldn't afford to or
didn't want to raise their children, or the children were
being abused, neglected, or mishandled in some way. Some were
also teenagers who were making the step to leave home
themselves with the aid of this free passage and clothing
(15:36):
and work help that would come without placements. Yeah. I
did not find horror stories of like children being taken
with no regard to their parents, but I did find
ones where the parents were pressured pretty extensively to give
up their children for their better good, you know, based
on the person who was speaking to them's idea of
(15:59):
what would be best for them. Um. His critics argued
that Brace was really taking it upon himself to dictate
what was best for these children, regardless of the parents
feelings or their actual situation. And as a side note,
the existence of parents for about half of these children
is one reason why the phrase orphan trains wasn't really
(16:22):
used at the time. The more common terms for the
setup were mercy trains and even baby trains. So one
of brace's actual stated goals was also to provide labor
and the less popular populated regions of the United States
where people were moving. Uh you know, there were new
families who were getting out to somewhere in the West,
(16:44):
and uh, you know, in a typical situation, they probably
would eventually have children, and the children were eventually helped
them on the fire. But they needed that child like
that child help now. Um. So for this reason, most
of the Children's Eights Society's children were between six and fourteen,
so they were old enough to do work, but young
(17:04):
enough to still be like trained and educated and maybe
not so said in their ways and and obstinate as
to cause problems for their new families. BRACE also definitely
had some monetary motivations, pointing out how much cheaper it
was to place children out than to put them into institutions.
(17:25):
And the last one is something that he denied, but
a lot of people pointed out a lot of the
children who went on Children's Aid Society trains were Catholic
or Jewish, and a lot of them were also Italian,
Polish or Irish, and these were all groups who faced
massive amounts of prejudice and discrimination. Um, Italian, Polish and
Irish people were all viewed as like second class and
(17:47):
inferior citizens. The families who received these children were mostly Protestant,
and they were mostly not Italian or Polish or Irish,
and so critics argued that Brace was trying to kind
of strip these children of their religion and their heritage
and to force them to assimilate to the culture that
he thought was the best one. Um. His like this
(18:10):
was sort of the response of him being like nah,
and his critics being like, yuh huh, Like it does
seem a little uh, a little problematic. That that was
that was generally how it went. He would say, well,
but they're they're just aren't as many you know, non
Protestant people out west, That's why. And people would say,
(18:32):
I don't really buy your argument. It definitely, like the
data set does sort of support a certain prejudice going
into it. The Children's Aid Society also did not work
with African American children, although exactly why this is the
case is not really clear. There were definitely fewer African
American homes in the West that could have taken the children.
(18:55):
But it's also possible that this whole exercise looked way
too much like slavery for anybody to be comfortable sending
black children. Or it's also very possible that racists did
not want that to be part of the system. Yeah,
nobody really clearly said why they were not working with
African American children. Some of the other outplacement organizations, seeing
(19:16):
what Brace was doing and seeing the flaws that people
were pointing out in his plan, tried to avoid the
controversies that he was generating. So, for example, the New
York Foundling Hospital was a Catholic organization, and it's since children,
including babies and toddlers, a lot of babies and toddler's
actually exclusively to Catholic homes. The Boston Home for a
(19:36):
Little Wanderers also claims that it's screening and follow up
processes were much more exact and stringent than BRACES. Were
so um. While the Children's Aid Society was the most
well known, there were a lot of other organizations that
were into this whole practice, and some of them, either
by their own claims or by actual documentation, seemed to
(19:57):
have taken more deliberate care with the whole process. Yeah,
and while the Children's Aid Society was mostly sending children
out to rural farming communities, the New York Foundling Hospital
and other agencies replacing children much closer to home. So
many of the children who were placed during this time
actually stayed in New York, contrary to the perception that
(20:18):
they all went west. And some of the other agencies
were definitely more oriented towards children's welfare and not so
much with the providing labor aspect of it. So this
whole phenomenon of the trains and outplacement it really hinged
upon assuming the best in people. So everybody was assuming
that the parents who were surrendering their children generally were
(20:41):
doing so because they thought it was in the children's
best interests uh. And everybody sort of assumed that the
parents who were taking in these children really were doing
so out of love and charity and not just to
get free labor. But in reality, of course, people are
not always doing their best, and when it comes to
what happened to the children that were involved, it's really
something of a mixed bag. Some found themselves genuinely in
(21:04):
happy homes, when they were loved and cared for, as
though they were a member of the family, working alongside
other siblings on farms or in family businesses. The whole
practice had its share of horror stories too, though they
were definitely children who were abused, one whose foster families
took them on strictly to act as unpaid manual labor.
(21:24):
There were family members who were separated one another, separated
from one another, and and the like. There are lots
and lots of surviving letters and diaries that tell of
children whose parents sent of a way with notes that
contained their names and their addresses so that they could
come back home eventually and stay in touch, only for
these notes to be taken away from the children by
(21:47):
placement agents as they slept on the trains. That's so heartbreaking, uh.
There are also many, many first person accounts of children
who just did not know or understand what was happening
to them. Some were too young to really grasp the situation,
and others were simply never told what was going on,
and in at least some cases, parents seem to have
(22:07):
been pressured, as Tracy mentioned earlier, into surrendering their children
when they didn't really want or possibly even need to.
Outplaced children also did not necessarily get a warm welcome
in their new communities. A lot of people viewed the
trained children as they were called, with suspicions. Surely they
must have been of poor character or have come from
(22:29):
bad families. There were also religious and cultural tensions as
Catholic children were placed with Protestant families, and as we
were speaking earlier speaking about earlier ethnic tensions with Irish
and Polish and Italian children who were placed into communities
that carried prejudices against all of these people, all of
these nationalities. So sometimes, you know, somebody, a child would
(22:55):
leave a situation where they were homeless and begging out
the streets, and they would wind up in the situation
where they had food and shelter, but were outcast and
faced derision from the community. And there were also cases
where foster parents had taken in these children and they
truly loved them and you know, raised them as their own,
and they lived in this sort of constant fear that
(23:15):
someone was going to come and take their child away
from them someday. There was finally an independent investigation of
the Children's Aid Society in eighteen eighty three, and it
found that there was very little screening of the prospective
parents and very little supervision of the overall process. A
significant number of the older boys who had been outplaced
(23:36):
had later run away from home, But overall, the investigators
found that for the most part, the children under the
age of fourteen who had been outplaced by the Children's
Aid Society we're doing okay. Outplaced as a child. Andrew
Burke became governor of North Dakota and John Brady became
governor of Alaska. They had both been sent to the
(23:57):
same town in Indiana on the same day, and the
man who adopted John Brady had actually been a judge there.
Because records weren't kept very well, while we do have,
you know, stories about what some of his children grew
up to be, a lot of times the children who
had been placed out lost all track of their birth
families if those families still lived, and so in you know,
(24:19):
more recent years, their children and grandchildren have been trying
to trace down the family genealogy and just have been
unable to figure out where their parents or grandparents came
from before they got on the train. The last train
ran on May thirty one, nine, carrying three children to
Sulfur Springs, Texas. And there were several things that kind
(24:40):
of worked altogether to really bring an end to this
UH approach to outplacement. One was at the Great Depression
made the trains financially unsustainable UH, and people began to
focus more on local outplacement of children. Prior to that,
the trains had gone nearly to every state included in
as well as Canada in Mexico. But also a big
(25:02):
factor in it was that social agencies had started focusing
on trying to keep children with their birth families wherever
that was possible. The agencies that had been part of
the orphan train movement later morphed into adoption and foster
care agencies as we think of them today, and Brace's
idea that children are better off in homes than in
institutions continues to be at the heart of today's foster
(25:25):
care programs. This movement is often credited for spawning the
foster care system as we know it today, and many
states adoption laws were put on the books in an
effort to rain in Brace's seemingly haphazard placement of children
with families. A lot of the news articles that you
will see about the Orphan Trains the American Heritage series
(25:47):
that was are the American Heritage uh TV show installment
that was about the Orphan Trains. Most of these are
from the mid nineties nineties, as the last writers of
the Orphan Trains were getting into their eighties and nineties,
so very few, if any, of the people who were
placed out on the trains survived today. But fortunately in
in the eighties and nineties, people did a lot of
(26:09):
documentation of like oral histories and first person accounts and
talking to people who had ridden on the trains and
been placed with the new family about their experiences. Today,
the Orphan Train Complex and other Orphan Train historical and
heritage societies trying to keep the movement documented and help
the descendants of children's who road to trains connect to
one another. So a whole lot of people have asked
(26:32):
us to talk about orphan trains. It's fascinating it well,
and it turned out to be a whole lot more
layered than what I knew of it going into it.
I basically knew the orphan trains. They took orphans on
trains to get new families, and that is pretty reductive. Yeah. Well,
and it's one of those things that there are a
lot of complex angles to it, Like wow, the initial
(26:53):
impetus for it was surely like a good intent, you
know it it ended up doing some not so great things,
but also had some legacies that were good. Yeah. Well,
and I think one of the things that uh may
not have occurred to anyone, or it might not have
been nearly as much common knowledge at the time, there
have definitely been efforts in multiple places in the world
(27:16):
two place minority children with majority families in an effort
to make them assimilate. Um. And while that was not
the like specified intention of any of the agencies that
were running orphan trains, it did have a little bit
of that flavor, which is troubling. Yeah, it's a like
(27:39):
I said, good and bad, some good legacy, some very
unfortunate circumstances. But do you have a spot of listener
mail for us? It is from Valerie. Valerie says hey,
Holly and Tracy. I was so excited to hear the
Pueblo Revolt episode. I, along with others, I am sure,
sent in a request for so long ago. I spent
a lot of time as a kid learning about that
(28:00):
time period outside of school. Growing up in Santa Fe
with my dad. Curating a Navajo museum has affected my
life in so many ways. Things like spending a couple
of weeks one winter living in a hogan is not
part of everyone's childhood. There's a favorite story that my
friend of my dad's told us that I thought you
guys might enjoy. Two of the artists my dad met
through the museum used to give tours around the Peblos
(28:22):
around Arizona and New Mexico. They were getting off the
bus with a group at a Hopie village. They walked
up to the village and there was a large sign
asking the visitors to respect the laws of this area
since it is an independent nation. The first on the
list was no photography. A lady in the group was
taking pictures of the sign, saying photography wasn't allowed. They
(28:42):
asked her to stop and not take any pictures. The
woman responded that they should have told her if they
really meant it. I wonder if they put up a
secondary part of the sign that said no, we really
mean it. Oh yeah, so that's that's a gonna get to.
This was so surprising to them that it became kind
(29:03):
of a joke phrase ending states, statements and requests with
and I really mean it. They even began to use
the acronym A W R M I and we really
mean it etched into the jury they made as part
of the identification marks. Uh. That cracked me up. That
is so every few podcast there's one that I know
(29:24):
some of the basic information because of a board game
I had played based on that time period. Most recently,
I played a game themed to being dressmakers in the
French Court a little before the time period of Rose Berton.
I ended up winning the game, and like the thing,
knowing about Rose gave me an edge. I also have
a game called voc about running ships as the Dutch
(29:44):
East India Company. I think that if I studied all
the themes of the games I played, I could probably
become a history buff. And then Valerie has an episode suggestion.
I wanted to read this in part because the the
and I really mean its story made me laugh so hard. Uh,
And because I love having board games that have some
kind of nod to history somehow or tie into history
(30:06):
in subway. Um, we have a giant board game closet,
several of which have some kind of historical high end
or theme. UM like Carcasson is one where you make
a French town. It's pretty awesome. So thank you, Valerie.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Our Facebook
(30:28):
is Facebook dot com slash miss in history, and our
Twitter is miss in History. Our tumbler is mrs in
history dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on pinterrestt
pinterest dot com slash missed in History. Our very own
website is that missed in history dot com. And if
you would like to learn more about what we've talked
about today, you can come to our parent website, how
(30:48):
stuff Works dot com, and you can put in the
word adoption in the search bar and you will find
how adoption works. You can learn all about that and
a whole lot more at our website, which is how
stuff works dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics.
Because of how stuff Works dot com in
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Tracy Wilson
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