Placed Out: The Children of the Orphan Trains

The train stops at a small town depot in the Midwest. A notice has run in the local paper for a week. Farmers and townspeople have come in from the country and are waiting in a church or an opera house. A line of children, washed and in their best clothes, is walked to the front of the room. Adults look them over. Some children are chosen that afternoon. Some are not, and get back on the train for the next town.

Between 1854 and 1929, charitable organizations sent an estimated 200,000 children from crowded eastern cities, especially New York, to live with families in rural areas, mostly in the Midwest. The program was called placing out. The trains that carried the children became known, much later, as orphan trains.

Why the trains ran

In the mid-nineteenth century, New York City was crowded with poor children. Many lived on the streets, selling newspapers, shining shoes or scavenging. Some were orphans. Many were not. They had a parent who was ill, in prison or too poor to keep them.

Charles Loring Brace, a young minister, founded the Children's Aid Society in New York in 1853. He believed that city institutions such as orphanages and almshouses did children harm, and that the best remedy was a family home in the countryside, where work and fresh air would build character. The first group of children was sent west in 1854.

Other institutions followed. The New York Foundling Hospital, run by the Sisters of Charity, sent young children by train to Catholic families who had requested them in advance, an arrangement sometimes described as "mercy trains" or "baby trains."

The paper bond

What strikes a modern reader is how informal the placements were. Children were generally not legally adopted. They were placed with families under an agreement, sometimes written, sometimes not, that the family would feed, clothe and educate the child and treat them as a member of the household. In return, older children often worked on the farm or in the house.

Local committees of respectable townspeople were supposed to vet families. Agents were supposed to visit later and check on the children. In practice, visits were infrequent, and the territory was large. A child placed in one county might be moved to another family if the first placement failed, sometimes more than once.

Some children found real homes. Some were treated as unpaid labor. Many experienced something in between. The surviving accounts are deeply mixed, and historians caution against telling the story only as a rescue or only as an abuse.

Names that changed

For children, the move often meant a break with everything before. Brothers and sisters were sometimes placed with different families in different towns. Some children kept their names. Others took the name of the family that took them in. Younger children sometimes grew up not knowing they had been placed at all.

Contact with birth parents was often discouraged, and in many cases lost. Records were kept by the sending institutions, but children and later their descendants could find it difficult to access them or to piece together where a sibling had gone.

In later life, many former riders set out to find their origins. Reunions organized by riders and their families in the twentieth century brought together people who had been separated for decades.

The record and the person

From the sending organizations' side, a child's journey often appears in a few lines: a name, an age, a date of departure, a town, the name of a family and perhaps a later note from an agent. These ledgers are a valuable archive, and also a reminder of how little of a life fits on a page.

The children were not blank slates. Many remembered parents, siblings, streets and languages. Some had been surrendered by parents who intended to reclaim them. The phrase "orphan train" itself hides this. Many of the riders were not orphans.

Why it ended

Placing out declined in the early twentieth century. States passed laws regulating the placement of children across state lines. Ideas about child welfare shifted toward supporting families so children could stay with their parents, and toward formal foster care with oversight. Mothers' pension programs, early forms of public aid to widowed and single mothers, began in the 1910s. The last trains ran in 1929.

Belonging, arranged

The orphan trains belong to a long history of attempts to give children new attachments by moving them. They raise questions that still matter in foster care and adoption: what children lose when they are separated from siblings, what records they need to understand their own lives and how a bond made by an agreement can become, or fail to become, a family.

The children in the line at the front of the church did not choose the room or the people looking at them. Some of them, decades later, would stand in front of another room, at a reunion, and tell the story themselves. That is where the paper record ends and the person begins.