Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. This week on the show, we talked
Speaker 1: about the practice babies that were part of home economics
Speaker 1: programs from the late nineteen to the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: For the most part, the babies in question had been
Speaker 1: living in orphanages or other child welfare institutions in a
Speaker 1: time while things like foster care and social work we're
Speaker 1: still evolving in the United States. Got me thinking about
Speaker 1: a previous episode that had some similar context about things
Speaker 1: that took place even earlier during that whole evolution. That is,
Speaker 1: the orphan trains, which relocated children, mostly from cities in
Speaker 1: the US to rural areas. Welcome to Stuff you missed
Speaker 1: in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chasey V. Wilson and
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Fry. Today we are drawing straight from the
Speaker 1: listener requests. Again. This is an the one that has
Speaker 1: been requested many, many, many times. It is orphan trains.
Speaker 1: If you have never heard of orphan trains before, this
Speaker 1: probably sounds to you like trains full of orphans being
Speaker 1: taken to new homes, just kind of correct. Between eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty four and ninety nine, about two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand children were taken to new families by train, except
Speaker 1: they weren't really called orphan trains at all at the time.
Speaker 1: A lot of the children were not actually orphans, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times these families who were taking them
Speaker 1: in were more like employers. So that is a story
Speaker 1: that we're going to tell today, UH And to get
Speaker 1: kind of some groundwork lab we're going to start with
Speaker 1: the context of the situation. After the end of the
Speaker 1: War of eighteen twelve, the population of the United States,
Speaker 1: and particularly in the eastern ports cities, really exploded. For example,
Speaker 1: about forty people lived in New York and eighteen hun
Speaker 1: rid and by nineteen hundreds, or just a hundred years later,
Speaker 1: it was close to a million and a half. So
Speaker 1: many of these new residents were desperately poor and very sick,
Speaker 1: having arrived with basically nothing from wherever they were immigrating from. UH.
Speaker 1: And depending on where they were immigrating from, they often
Speaker 1: faced a lot of prejudice and discrimination, which made it
Speaker 1: harder for them to find work and get on their feet.
Speaker 1: As a consequence of this influx of people and poverty,
Speaker 1: the US saw the rise of its first slums, poverty
Speaker 1: has had always existed, but now there were entire neighborhoods
Speaker 1: that were really destitute. They had high crime rates, the
Speaker 1: buildings were deteriorating, and the circumstances were just apparently hopeless.
Speaker 1: And that was the prevailing scenario, and an alarming number
Speaker 1: of the people who lived in these neighborhoods were children.
Speaker 1: Some of the children really were orphans, uh some had
Speaker 1: at least one living parent who for whatever reason couldn't
Speaker 1: or didn't support them, but regardless, by the mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: there were somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand homeless
Speaker 1: children living in the slums of New York City, which
Speaker 1: at that point only had the whole city only had
Speaker 1: a total population of five thousand people, so that's a
Speaker 1: pretty significant chunk of the population that are homeless street children.
Speaker 1: In New York and other cities, children formed gangs to
Speaker 1: try to keep themselves safe and supported themselves through petty
Speaker 1: theft and other crime, or even through begging. Others would
Speaker 1: find work in factories or as newsboys or shoeshine boys,
Speaker 1: and some sold matches or rags on street corners and
Speaker 1: in some cases became prostitutes because they kind of wandered
Speaker 1: like nomads through the city. People referred to these children
Speaker 1: often as street arabs, and this all kind of calls
Speaker 1: up images of like scrooges, Street Urgin or Oliver twist Um,
Speaker 1: And for a lot of children, that's pretty much how
Speaker 1: it really was, and when no other resources to handle them,
Speaker 1: cities resorted to incarcerating children in workhouses and prisons that
Speaker 1: had been meant for adults, but eventually they would build
Speaker 1: prisons and asylums for juveniles, which were really not much better.
Speaker 1: The field of social work also barely, if at all,
Speaker 1: existed at this point. We've done a previous a series
Speaker 1: of podcasts on Jane Adams, who thought of as the
Speaker 1: mother of social work. She started doing her groundbreaking work
Speaker 1: kind of in the middle of when all of this
Speaker 1: was going on. So there was you know, if if
Speaker 1: law enforcement found a child who was in danger there
Speaker 1: it wasn't like there was a social worker or a
Speaker 1: department of social services they could call for help. There
Speaker 1: was also no foster care system. Foster care itself did exist,
Speaker 1: but it was in a very informal way, with individual
Speaker 1: families taking on children in need and in that sense,
Speaker 1: fostering has really existed for as long as families have.
Speaker 1: But there was no organized system for placing children in
Speaker 1: foster families or for screening potential foster parents, and there
Speaker 1: were also virtually no adoption laws in the United States
Speaker 1: at this point. The first adoption law passed in the
Speaker 1: US was in Massachusetts and that was past in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty one. But other than that, there was, you know,
Speaker 1: before that point, there was no legal governance about how
Speaker 1: one made it official that this child was now part
Speaker 1: of your family. So, as a result of all of
Speaker 1: this and all of these sort of gaps in uh
Speaker 1: a social way to deal with all these children. Homeless
Speaker 1: children were a huge issue in many cities, particularly port cities,
Speaker 1: and the government's in question just didn't have the resources
Speaker 1: or programs that they would need to do much about it.
Speaker 1: This brings us to Charles Loring Brace of Hartford, Connecticut.
Speaker 1: He was a Presbyterian from a middle class family, and
Speaker 1: he moved to New York City in eighteen forty eight
Speaker 1: so we could go to seminary. He was really horrified
Speaker 1: at this situation with homeless and orphaned children, and it
Speaker 1: was not just because what was happening to these children
Speaker 1: was horrifying. It was also because he thought that these
Speaker 1: hordes of unsupervised, marauding children were a threat to the
Speaker 1: social order. His opinion was that these kids who didn't
Speaker 1: have families and were kind of left up to their
Speaker 1: own devices and were often making ends meet for themselves
Speaker 1: through petty theft and other crime. He just thought they
Speaker 1: were going to going to grow up into hardened criminal adults,
Speaker 1: and he became really fixated on them. He would go
Speaker 1: exploring through the city's poorest neighborhoods and interview them and
Speaker 1: record their conversations in a journal, and he became really
Speaker 1: motivated to try to find some way to take care
Speaker 1: of this problem of homeless children left alone to do
Speaker 1: as they will. In March of eighteen fifty three, he
Speaker 1: started the Children Aid Society, and the first programs of
Speaker 1: the Children's Aid Society were Sunday school and vocational training,
Speaker 1: and the society also started the United States first home
Speaker 1: for runaways, the Newsboys Lodging House. Almost immediately though, the
Speaker 1: Children's Aid Society was just overrun with demand. There were
Speaker 1: not enough jobs or enough money to provide the services
Speaker 1: that these children really needed. Um you know, at this
Speaker 1: point in history, it was pretty normal for children to
Speaker 1: work in some way, and while they were trying to
Speaker 1: match up children with jobs, the children vastly outnumbered at
Speaker 1: the jobs UH, and they did not have the funding
Speaker 1: to to do more to really help. And Brace wanted
Speaker 1: to do more, but he didn't just want to build
Speaker 1: more facilities to handle more children. He thought prisons and
Speaker 1: asylums were the wrong approach. In his words, quote, the
Speaker 1: best of all asylums for the outcast child is the
Speaker 1: farmers home. The great duty is to get these children
Speaker 1: of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and to
Speaker 1: send them away to kind Christian homes in the country.
Speaker 1: This is kind of alludes to the plan that Brace
Speaker 1: came up with, which he called the immigration plan. This
Speaker 1: was that they would gather up children from New York
Speaker 1: who were homeless or whose parents couldn't care for them,
Speaker 1: and they would send them west to work on farms.
Speaker 1: This became known as outplacement. So you're placing children out
Speaker 1: versus placing them into an orphanage or an institution. He
Speaker 1: didn't exactly invent the idea of outplacement, UH. The this
Speaker 1: act of like placing children out with other families existed before,
Speaker 1: but the Children's Aid Society and brace's influence on it
Speaker 1: really became the biggest and most well known outplacement effort.
Speaker 1: So the Children's Aid Society turned its focus to raising
Speaker 1: money and working through all of the legal requirements involved
Speaker 1: in finding new homes for children, and to finding the
Speaker 1: children to send, sometimes working directly with the birth parents themselves.
Speaker 1: As the Children's Aid Society started sending the children out
Speaker 1: on trains and the program really started to take off,
Speaker 1: other agencies followed suit and they placed children from other
Speaker 1: major cities in the Northeast elsewhere in the United States.
Speaker 1: And before we talk about what exactly was happening with
Speaker 1: these trains, let's take a moment for a brief word
Speaker 1: from a sponsor. So let's take a look at what
Speaker 1: was going on with the orphans and the trains. So,
Speaker 1: before being put on the trains, these children would be
Speaker 1: given new clothes or put into their best clothes if
Speaker 1: they had clothes that were serviceable. Often this meant that
Speaker 1: they were in a new outfit that had been provided
Speaker 1: to them by charity. They were meant to look their best,
Speaker 1: but depending on how and difficult the journey was, sometimes
Speaker 1: what really happened was by the time they arrived they
Speaker 1: were filthy and sick. Someone representing the agency usually went
Speaker 1: on the train with them, and often another agent had
Speaker 1: gone ahead to spread the word and begin screening potential
Speaker 1: parents and assembling a committee of local people, which usually
Speaker 1: included doctors and clergy, to help with the approvals. Agencies
Speaker 1: would also distribute leaflets and place advertisements about the children.
Speaker 1: Here's an example of an ad that ran in Nebraska.
Speaker 1: In All children received under the care of this association
Speaker 1: are of special promise in intelligence and health, and are
Speaker 1: in age from one month to twelve years, and are
Speaker 1: sent free to those receiving them on ninety days trial,
Speaker 1: unless a special contract is otherwise made. Homes are wanted
Speaker 1: for the following children. Eight boys, ages ten, six and
Speaker 1: four years English parents. Blondes very promising two years old, blonde,
Speaker 1: fine looking, healthy American, has had his foot straightened, walks
Speaker 1: now okay. Six years old, dark hair and eyes, good
Speaker 1: looking at intelligent American. Ten babies boys and girls from
Speaker 1: one month to three months. One boy. Baby has fine
Speaker 1: head and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty
Speaker 1: three months old. Agencies also had rules for the placements themselves,
Speaker 1: here's the Children's Aid Society rule for the placement of boys.
Speaker 1: Applications must be endorsed by the local Committee. Boys under
Speaker 1: fifteen years of age, if not legally adopted, must be
Speaker 1: retained as members of the family and sent to school
Speaker 1: according to the educational laws of the state until they
Speaker 1: are eighteen years old. Suitable provisions must then be made
Speaker 1: for their future. Boys between fifteen and sixteen years of
Speaker 1: age must be retained as members of the family and
Speaker 1: sent to school during the winter months until they're seventeen
Speaker 1: years old, when a mutual arrangement may be made. Boys
Speaker 1: over sixteen years of age must be retained as members
Speaker 1: of the family for one year, after which a mutual
Speaker 1: arrangement may be made. Parties taking boys agree to write
Speaker 1: to the Society at least once a year, or to
Speaker 1: have the boys do so. Removals of boys providing unsatisfactory
Speaker 1: can be arranged through the local committee or an agent
Speaker 1: of the Society, the party agreeing to retain the boy
Speaker 1: a reasonable length of time after notifying the Society of
Speaker 1: the desired change. This kind of reminds me of, uh,
Speaker 1: when you get a pet through pet rescue, Like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and obviously this particular set of rules is from after
Speaker 1: states that started to pass adoption laws, which was actually
Speaker 1: done in part to kind of curtail the more willy
Speaker 1: nilly aspects of this placement of children that was going on.
Speaker 1: Um When the train arrived at a town, the children
Speaker 1: would be taken to a playhouse or a theater or
Speaker 1: some other suitable gathering place that had places for spectators
Speaker 1: and places to display the children, and the children will
Speaker 1: be paraded across the state for the families to inspect.
Speaker 1: And so the term up for adoption purportedly comes from
Speaker 1: this practice of literally putting the children up on stage,
Speaker 1: and often the whole town would come to watch, whether
Speaker 1: they wanted a child or not. Sometimes the children would
Speaker 1: be asked to say something or perform in some way,
Speaker 1: and the prospective families would ask questions of them and
Speaker 1: sometimes inspect them in a way that was more reminiscent
Speaker 1: of buying a horse or a slave. In some towns,
Speaker 1: demand for these children was really huge, and families would
Speaker 1: almost come to blows over who could pick from the
Speaker 1: limited number of children. Foster families were supposed to have
Speaker 1: references from their pastor or the justice of the peace
Speaker 1: attesting to their character, but if none was available, the
Speaker 1: agent in charge would often just judge based on their appearance,
Speaker 1: their dress, and their demeanor. Children who couldn't find a
Speaker 1: placement would be put back on the train to be
Speaker 1: sent on to the next town, or, failing that, would
Speaker 1: wind up in a local orphanage or some other local
Speaker 1: facility for homeless children. For most agencies, the record keeping
Speaker 1: was pretty lax um, The screening was pretty minimal, and
Speaker 1: depending on who you asked, these people taking in children
Speaker 1: could be considered parents or they could be considered more
Speaker 1: like employers. There was also not a lot of follow
Speaker 1: up after the fact. Travel was really difficult and expensive
Speaker 1: at this point, which became a big deterrent against sending
Speaker 1: representatives from the agencies to check up on people. UH.
Speaker 1: Some of them, like the Children's Aid Society, had planned
Speaker 1: initially to do in person follow ups on a regular basis,
Speaker 1: but that never really came to fruition UH, and that
Speaker 1: pretty much meant that they were relying on the families
Speaker 1: or the children to send letters back to the agency,
Speaker 1: which also sometimes happened and sometimes not. And although most
Speaker 1: of the agencies that were kind of doing these sorts
Speaker 1: of projects out placing children followed sim sular methods. The
Speaker 1: Children's Aid Society really got some particular criticisms, and we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about those after we have a quick
Speaker 1: word from our sponsor. A lot of agencies, not just
Speaker 1: the Children's Aid Society, got involved in sending children out
Speaker 1: west or to some other place by train. Um Charles
Speaker 1: Loring Brace in particular, though, had some aspects to what
Speaker 1: he was doing in his philosophy that are kind of problematic.
Speaker 1: He was really sure that farms were the best places
Speaker 1: for New York's impoverished children. They would get used to
Speaker 1: doing honest work there, and they would ideally have the
Speaker 1: affection and support of a family. And this, I mean,
Speaker 1: it sounds like an at least well meaning plan on
Speaker 1: the surface, but there are aspects of it that are
Speaker 1: pretty problematic. Fewer than half of the children that were
Speaker 1: sent on the trains by the Children and Aid Society
Speaker 1: were actually orphans. Roughly a quarter of them had one
Speaker 1: living parent, and about a quarter had both parents still living,
Speaker 1: so fifty of them had some parent in the mix.
Speaker 1: Arguably the living parents couldn't afford to or didn't want
Speaker 1: to raise their children, or the children are being abused, neglected,
Speaker 1: or mishandled in some way. Some were also teenagers who
Speaker 1: were making the step to leave home themselves with the
Speaker 1: aid of this free passage and clothing and work help
Speaker 1: that would come without placements. Yeah, I did not find
Speaker 1: horror stories of like children being taken with no regard
Speaker 1: to their parents. But I did find ones where the
Speaker 1: parents were pressured pretty extensively to give up their children
Speaker 1: for their better good, you know, based on the person
Speaker 1: who was speaking to them's idea of what would be
Speaker 1: best for them. Um. His critics argued that Brace was
Speaker 1: really taking it upon himself to dictate what was best
Speaker 1: for these children, regardless of the parents feelings or their
Speaker 1: actual situation. And as a side note, the existence of
Speaker 1: parents for about half of these children is one reason
Speaker 1: why the phrase orphan trains wasn't really used at the time.
Speaker 1: The more common terms for the set up where mercy
Speaker 1: trains and even baby trains. So one of Brace's actual
Speaker 1: stated goals was also to provide labor and the less
Speaker 1: popular populated regions of the United States where people were moving.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, there were new families who were getting
Speaker 1: out to somewhere in the West, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in a typical situation, they probably would eventually have children,
Speaker 1: and the children were eventually helped them on the farm,
Speaker 1: but they needed that child like that child help now. Um.
Speaker 1: So for this reason, most of the Children's Aid Society's
Speaker 1: children were between six and fourteen, so they were old
Speaker 1: enough to do work, but young enough to still be
Speaker 1: like trained and educated and maybe not so said in
Speaker 1: their ways and and obstinate as to cause problems for
Speaker 1: their new families. Brace also definitely had some monetary motivations,
Speaker 1: pointing out how much cheaper it was to place children
Speaker 1: out than to put them into institutions. And the last
Speaker 1: one is something that he denied, but a lot of
Speaker 1: people pointed out a lot of the children who went
Speaker 1: on Children's Aid Society trains were Catholic or Jewish, and
Speaker 1: a lot of them were also Italian, Polish or Irish,
Speaker 1: and these were all groups who faced massive amounts of
Speaker 1: prejudice and discrimination. Um Italian, Polish and Irish people were
Speaker 1: all viewed as like second class and inferior citizens. The
Speaker 1: families who received these children were mostly Protestant, and they
Speaker 1: were mostly not Italian or Polish or Irish, and so
Speaker 1: critics argued that Brace was trying to kind of strip
Speaker 1: these children of their religion and their heritage and to
Speaker 1: force them to assimilate to the culture that he thought
Speaker 1: was the best one. Um his like this was sort
Speaker 1: of the response of him being like nah, and his
Speaker 1: critics being like, yuh huh, Like it does seem a little, uh,
Speaker 1: a little problematic that that was That was generally how
Speaker 1: it went. He would say, well, but they're they're just
Speaker 1: aren't as many, you know, non Protestant people out west,
Speaker 1: That's why. And people would say, I don't really buy
Speaker 1: your argument. It definitely like the data set does sort
Speaker 1: of support a certain prejudice going into it. The Children's
Speaker 1: Aid Society also did not work with African American children,
Speaker 1: although exactly why this is the case is not really clear.
Speaker 1: There were definitely fewer African American homes in the West
Speaker 1: that could have taken the children. But it's also possible
Speaker 1: that this whole exercise looked way too much like slavery
Speaker 1: for anybody to be comfortable sending black children, or it's
Speaker 1: also very possible that racists did not want that to
Speaker 1: be part of the system. Yeah, nobody really clearly said
Speaker 1: why they were not working with African American children. Some
Speaker 1: of the other outplacement organizations, seeing what Brace was doing
Speaker 1: and seeing the flaws that people were pointing out in
Speaker 1: his plan, tried to avoid the controversies that he was generating. So,
Speaker 1: for example, the New York Foundling Hospital was a Catholic
Speaker 1: organization and it's since children, including babies and toddlers, a
Speaker 1: lot of babies and toddler's actually exclusively to Catholic homes.
Speaker 1: The Boston Home for Little Wanderers also claims that it's
Speaker 1: screening and follow up processes were much more exact and
Speaker 1: stringent than Braces were. So um, while the Children's Aid
Speaker 1: Society was the most well known, there were a lot
Speaker 1: of other organizations that were into this whole practice, and
Speaker 1: some of them, either by their own claims or by
Speaker 1: actual documentation, seemed to have taken more deliberate care with
Speaker 1: the whole process. Yeah, and while the Children's Aid Society
Speaker 1: was mostly sending children out to rural farming communities, the
Speaker 1: New York Foundling Hospital and other agencies replacing children much
Speaker 1: closer to home, So many of the children who were
Speaker 1: placed during this time actually stayed in New York. Contrary
Speaker 1: to the perception that they all went west, and some
Speaker 1: of the other agencies were definitely more oriented toward children's
Speaker 1: welfare and not so much with the providing labor aspect
Speaker 1: of it. So this whole phenomenon of the trains and
Speaker 1: outplacement it really hinged upon assuming the best in people.
Speaker 1: So everybody was assuming that the parents who were surrendering
Speaker 1: their children generally were doing so because they thought it
Speaker 1: was in the children's best interests uh. And everybody sort
Speaker 1: of assumed that the parents who were taking in these
Speaker 1: children really were doing so out of love and charity
Speaker 1: and not just to get free labor. But in reality,
Speaker 1: of course, people are not always doing their best, and
Speaker 1: when it comes to what happened to the children that
Speaker 1: were involved, it's really something of a mixed bag. Some
Speaker 1: found themselves genuinely in happy homes when they were loved
Speaker 1: and cared for, as though they were a member of
Speaker 1: the family, working alongside other siblings on farms or in
Speaker 1: family businesses. The whole practice had its share of horror
Speaker 1: stories too, though they were definitely children who were abused,
Speaker 1: one whose foster families took them on strictly to act
Speaker 1: as unpaid manual labor. There were family members who were
Speaker 1: separated one another, separated from one another, and and the like.
Speaker 1: There are lots and lots of surviving letters and diaries
Speaker 1: that tell of children whose parents sent them away with
Speaker 1: notes that contained their names and their addresses so that
Speaker 1: they could come back home eventually and stay in touch,
Speaker 1: only for these notes to be taken away from the
Speaker 1: children by placement agents as they slept on the trains.
Speaker 1: That's so heartbreaking. Uh. There are also many, many first
Speaker 1: person accounts of children who just did not know or
Speaker 1: understand what was happening to them. Some were too young
Speaker 1: to really grasp the situation, and others were simply never
Speaker 1: told what was going on, and in at least some cases,
Speaker 1: parents seemed to have been pressured, as Tracy mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: into surrendering their children when they didn't really want or
Speaker 1: possibly even need to. Outplaced children also did not necessarily
Speaker 1: get a warm welcome in their new communities. A lot
Speaker 1: of people viewed the trained children as they were called,
Speaker 1: with suspicions. Surely they must have been of poor character
Speaker 1: or have come from bad families. There were also religious
Speaker 1: and cultural tensions as Catholic children were placed with Protestant families,
Speaker 1: and as we were speaking earlier, speaking about earlier ethnic
Speaker 1: tensions with Irish and Polish and Italian children who were
Speaker 1: placed into communities that carried prejudices against all of these people,
Speaker 1: all of these nationalities. So sometimes, you know, somebody, a
Speaker 1: child would leave a situation where they were homeless and
Speaker 1: begging out the streets, and they would wind up in
Speaker 1: the situation where they had food and shelter, but were
Speaker 1: outcast and faced derision from the community. And there were
Speaker 1: also cases where foster parents had taken in these children
Speaker 1: and they truly loved them and you know, raised them
Speaker 1: as their own, and they lived in this sort of
Speaker 1: constant fear that someone was going to come and take
Speaker 1: their child away from them some day. There was finally
Speaker 1: an independent investigation of the Children's Aid Society in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, and it found that there was very little
Speaker 1: screening of the prospective parents and very little supervision of
Speaker 1: the overall process. A significant number of the older boys
Speaker 1: who had been outplaced had later run away from home,
Speaker 1: But overall, the investigators found that for the most part,
Speaker 1: the children under the age of fourteen who had been
Speaker 1: outplaced by the Children's Aid Society we're doing okay. Outplaced
Speaker 1: as a child. Andrew Burke became governor of North Dakota
Speaker 1: and John Brady became governor of Alaska. They had both
Speaker 1: been sent to the same town in Indiana on the
Speaker 1: same day, and the man who adopted John Brady had
Speaker 1: actually been a judge there. Because records weren't kept very
Speaker 1: well l while we do have, you know, stories about
Speaker 1: what some of new children grew up to be, a
Speaker 1: lot of times the children who had been placed out
Speaker 1: lost all track of their birth families if those families
Speaker 1: still lived, and so in you know, more recent years,
Speaker 1: their children and grandchildren have been trying to trace down
Speaker 1: the family genealogy and just have been unable to figure
Speaker 1: out where their parents or grandparents came from before they
Speaker 1: got on the train. The last train ran on May
Speaker 1: thirty one, n nine, carrying three children to Sulfur Springs, Texas.
Speaker 1: And there were several things that kind of worked altogether
Speaker 1: to really bring an end to this UH approach to outplacement.
Speaker 1: One was that the Great Depression made the trains financially
Speaker 1: unsustainable UH, and people began to focus more on local
Speaker 1: outplacement of children. Prior to that, the trains had gone
Speaker 1: nearly to every state included in as well as Canada
Speaker 1: and Mexico. But also a big factor in it was
Speaker 1: that social agencies had started focusing on trying to keep
Speaker 1: children with their birth Emily's wherever that was possible. The
Speaker 1: agencies that had been part of the orphan Train movement
Speaker 1: later morphed into adoption and foster care agencies as we
Speaker 1: think of them today, and Brace's idea that children are
Speaker 1: better off in homes than in institutions continues to be
Speaker 1: at the heart of today's foster care programs. This movement
Speaker 1: is often credited for spawning the foster care system as
Speaker 1: we know it today, and many states adoption laws were
Speaker 1: put on the books in an effort to rain in
Speaker 1: Bruce's seemingly haphazard placement of children with families. A lot
Speaker 1: of the news articles that you will see about the
Speaker 1: Orphan Trains the American Heritage series that was are the
Speaker 1: American Heritage uh TV show installment that was about the
Speaker 1: Orphan Trains. Most of these are from the mid nineties nineties,
Speaker 1: as the last writers of the Orphan Trains were getting
Speaker 1: into their eighties and nineties, so very few, if any
Speaker 1: of the people who were placed out on the trains
Speaker 1: survived today, but fortunately in and the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: people did a lot of documentation of like oral histories
Speaker 1: and first person accounts and talking to people who had
Speaker 1: ridden on the trains and been placed with a new
Speaker 1: family about their experiences. Today, the Orphan Train Complex and
Speaker 1: other Orphan train historical and heritage societies try to keep
Speaker 1: the movement documented and help the descendants of children's who
Speaker 1: road to trains connect to one another. So a whole
Speaker 1: lot of people have asked us to talk about orphan trains. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating it. Well, and it turned out to be
Speaker 1: a whole lot more layered than what I knew of
Speaker 1: it going into it. I basically knew the orphan trains
Speaker 1: they took orphans on trains to get new families, and
Speaker 1: that is pretty reductive. Yeah. Well, and it's one of
Speaker 1: those things that there are a lot of complex angles
Speaker 1: to it, Like, wow, the initial impetus for it was
Speaker 1: surely like a good intent, you know it it ended
Speaker 1: up doing some not so great things, but also had
Speaker 1: some legacies that were good. Yeah. Well, and I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that uh may not have occurred
Speaker 1: to anyone, or it might not have been nearly as
Speaker 1: much common knowledge at the time. There have definitely been
Speaker 1: efforts in multiple places in the world two place minority
Speaker 1: children with majority families in an effort to make them
Speaker 1: assimilate um And while that was not this like specified
Speaker 1: intention of any of the agencies that were running orphan trains,
Speaker 1: it did have a little bit of that flavor which
Speaker 1: is troubling. Yeah, it's ah, like I said, good and bad,
Speaker 1: some good legacy, some very unfortunate circumstances. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If
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