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THIS ANONYMOUS LETTER, ALONG WITH THE UNNAMED

infant attached to it, was left in a basket outside New York’sFoundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity in the 1860s. It tells theend of a pitiful story. But the story it begins is something else entirely.

Between 1854 and 1929, a quarter million abandoned babies and“street rats” (as the older children were referred to by police) leftslums in New York, Boston, and other coastal cities aboard trains,headed for new lives in the country. Their experiences are recount-

murder of an unoffending old man . . . is nothing tothem. They are ready for any offense of crime, how-ever degraded or bloody.

Brace’s early outreach consisted of “boys meetings” at whichyoung men received food and Bible instruction. Brace quicklyrealized, however, the need to do more. “It wasn’t really helpingat all,” says Stephanie Haiar, curator at the National Orphan TrainComplex. “They’d come in to get the free meal . . . and thenthey’d go back out on the streets and continue doing what theywere doing.”

The solution, Brace decided, was work. “There is no doubtthat a lad with a trade feels a peculiar independence of theworld,” he wrote, “and is much less likely to take up dishonestmeans of living.” The question became where to find jobs. NewYork’s labor unions refused to employ boys, but all was not lost:“Our hope in this matter is in the steady demand for juvenilelabor in the country districts, and the substantial rewards whichawait industry there.”

In 1853, Brace started the Children’s Aid Society, whichorganized the exodus of orphans by the trainload. He hitchedthe foster-care-cum-employment agency to the expanding rail-road system. “After the Civil War, when the train network beginsto spread westward, you have this huge influx of settlers,” saidHolt. “Then you have a local population that’s willing to takechildren, and in some cases demanding [them], because there isa need for more people to help build up the country.”

Children would board a westbound train in groups of up toforty, accompanied by two agents from the society, and preced-

Lost Children Riders on the Orphan Train

“Dear Sisters, By the love of God be so kind as to take this poor orphanchild and if she should die, please to bury her for me and I will be veryhappy. . . . I can’t afford to bury her.”

Double-crossed:East Side kids

play rough.—Brown Brothers

B y D a n S c h e u e r m a n

ed at the new National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia,Kansas, as well as in the new documentary, Placing Out, bothsponsored by the Kansas Humanities Council.

The story begins, like most, with a man coming to town. Theman was Charles Loring Brace, and the town was New York City.In 1849, the young Presbyterian minister arrived on the wings ofa vocation to evangelize the poor. “Mr. Brace had grandiose ideasof his goal on this earth,” Sara Jane Richter, professor of history atOklahoma Panhandle State University, says on camera in PlacingOut. “He intended to lead as many people as he could to aChristian lifestyle, and he thought he should start young—withyoung people—because he saw young, untended children asfuture criminals.”

He came to the right place. Over the course of the nineteenthcentury, New York’s social structure buckled under the influx ofimmigrants. The Five Points neighborhood in Manhattan becameAmerica’s first slum in 1825. “By 1850,” said Marilyn Holt, authorof The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America and a major sourcefor the Placing Out film, “there are 10,000 children either livingfull- or part-time on the streets of New York.”

In his 1872 book, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and TwentyYears’ Work Among Them, Brace described the young gangs ofNew York’s Eleventh Ward:

They are far more brutal than the peasantry fromwhom they descend, and they are much bandedtogether, in associations, such as “Dead Rabbit,” “Plug-ugly,” and various target companies. They are ourenfants perdus, grown up to young manhood. The

A quarter million children rode theorphan trains from 1854 to 1929. —Kansas State Historical Society

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ed by circulars advertising, said Holt, “their ‘little laborers,’ as theywere called.”

When the trains stopped, the children were paraded from thedepot into a local playhouse, where they were put up on stage,thus the origin of the term “up for adoption.” Here, “they tookturns giving their names, singing a little ditty, or ‘saying a piece,’”according to an exhibit panel from the National Orphan TrainComplex. Less cute scenarios, said Richter, resembled slave auc-tions. “People came along and prodded them, and looked, andfelt, and saw how many teeth they had.”

The demand was fierce, with many trains visiting the sametowns over and over. Holt told of one instance in Maryville,Kansas, where “there were 150 families wanting to adopt, or takein, fourteen children, and they almost had fisticuffs out in the streetbecause there were so many people who wanted these few children.”

Although the demand was motivated by a need for labor, theChildren’s Aid Society took pains to ensure the children were wellcared for. Families applying to take children had to be endorsedby a committee of local business owners, doctors, and journalists.According to the society’s “Terms on Which Boys are Placed inHomes,” boys under twelve were to be “treated by the applicantsas one of their own children in matters of schooling, clothing, andtraining,” and boys twelve to fifteen were to be “sent to a schoola part of each year.” Representatives from the society would visiteach family once a year to check conditions, and children wereexpected to write letters back to the society twice a year.

The personal histories related in the National Orphan TrainComplex and in Placing Out tend not to dwell on the labor

(top left) Nineteenth-century New York’s teeming streets.—Children’s Aid Society

(left) Circulars from the Children’s Aid Society appealed tofarmers for “kind care, good examples, and moral training” on behalf of orphans. —National Orphan Train Complex

(bottom) A gang of boys in New York’s Mulberry Bend tenement neighborhood in 1897. —Corbis/Bettman

Because fresh air wasconsidered a cure-all, theChildren’s Aid Society heldclasses for anemic children outdoors. For the children the society placed for adoption,to be treated like family meantoveralls and farm work.

required of riders, unless there was abuse associated with it. AsRoberta Lowrey, genealogist and great-granddaughter of a trainrider, told filmmakers, child labor was a fact of life, “whether youwere an orphan train rider, or whether you were born into a farmfamily in the Midwest, or a cotton-picking family in Texas, or acorn-growing family in Iowa.”

The hardships most often described are emotional ones. “Thepeople who took my father in spoke what we call thePlautdietsch,” Francis Schippers recounts in the film, “and they hadto have his brother interpret for him.” The new brother tookadvantage of the language barrier to shovel all the chores onto theadopted child, who was acutely aware of not fitting in. The paleIrish redhead was teased for being “one of those.”

Other stories tell of siblings separated, or the heartache ofguessing one’s origins. As often, though, the riders, the youngestof whom today are around eighty years old, speak with gratitudetoward their foster families. Irma Craig Schneiders, who rode thetrain to Osage City, Missouri, in 1901, wrote of a family that“loved me and reared me just like I was their own child. Fromthem I learned the rules of good behavior, the miracle of the sanc-tity of life, and love for a Creator and the marvels of the world.”

Linda McCaffery, a professor at Barton County CommunityCollege in Kansas interviewed for Placing Out, described a rangeof experiences as diverse as the quarter million orphans who rodethe trains. “Many were used as strictly slave farm labor, but thereare stories, wonderful stories of children ending up in fine familiesthat loved them, cherished them, [and] educated them.”

“Here’s the real nugget of what happened,” said Lowrey. “Theywere so much better off than if they had been left on the streetsof New York. . . . They were just not going to survive, or if theyhad, their fate would surely have been awful.” 8

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—Children’s Aid Society —National Orphan Train Complex—National Orphan Train Complex

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