History Of Orphan Rides

The Ride Home

Imagine you're on a train to a place you don't know, with hundreds of other children riding with you. At the next stop you get off and hundreds of adults surround you. You hear them talking and mumbling but you cannot understand what they are saying. Some point at you and grab your arms to see your muscles. Complete strangers come over to examine you and scrutinize over whether to adopt you, one of the orphan train riders, into their homes. The orphan trains are a part of American history unknown by many. However, they played a huge impact in the passing of different laws and the foster care system today.

According to the orphan train documentary by Ozarks public television and the orphan train depot website, between 1853 and 1929 an estimated 250,000 children were relocated from major east coast cities such as New York and Boston, to new homes throughout the United States and Canada. Most of them moved westward to newly settled areas such as Texas and Missouri. At its peak the Orphan Trains were moving 3,000 to 4,000 children a year. The first load of forty-two children was sent out in 1854 to Michigan. All of them were six years old or older and they were adopted by farmers who used them to pick apples. These children became the first documented foster children in the United States. There were two big societies that helped with the orphan trains, the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital. Reverend Charles Lauren Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1853 in hopes to take homeless children and teach them skills in order to get them jobs. Later he began to place children in the country with new families. According to the “Baby Trains” article by Dianne Creagh, Sister Mary Irene founde...

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...eighteen and are dropped out of the system. There are not enough social workers for all the children in the system, and sometimes it becomes simply impossible to care for all the children without forgetting some. Though this becoming less and less it still happens.

The orphan trains are an unknown time period in American history, where children were taken from urban centers and shipped west in order to start new lives. Many children had one or more parents still living but their parents could not afford to take care of them. Siblings were split up and often never saw one another again. Some children found loving families, but others were abused and treated as slaves. The hardships that the children faced helped shaped laws and regulations for child welfare, labor laws, and adoption laws. It had its biggest impact on the foster care system and how it works today.