Orphan Trains By Angelique Brown for VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project
“When a child of the streets stands before you in rags, with a tear-stained face, you cannot easily forget him. And yet, you are perplexed what to do. The human soul is difficult to interfere with. You hesitate how far you should go.” – Charles Loring Brace
Introduction: Between 1854 and 1929 the United States was engaged in an ambitious, and ultimately controversial, social experiment to rescue poor and homeless children, the Orphan Train Movement. The Orphan Trains operated prior to the federal government’s involvement in child protection and child welfare. While they operated, Orphan Trains moved approximately 200,000 children from cities like New York and Boston to the American West to be adopted. Many of these children were placed with parents who loved and cared for them; however others always felt out of place and some were even mistreated.
Trying to get children off the streets
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During the 1850s there were thousands of children living on the streets of several major cities. The children were in search of food, shelter, and money and sold rags, matches, and newspapers just to survive. The children formed gangs for protection because life on the street was dangerous and they were regularly victimized. The police often arrested the children, some as young as five years old, and put them in lock up facilities with adult criminals. Determined to remedy the situation, the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital devised a program to take children off of the streets of New York and Boston and place them in homes in the American West rather than allow them to continue to be arrested and taken advantage of on the streets. Because the children were transported by train to their new homes, the term “orphan trains” began being used.
It was Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Childrens Aid Society, who first came up with the idea of placing needy children with families in the West rather than in orphanages. Brace felt that orphanages were overcrowded and gloomy places that did not teach children to become productive and functioning adults who could take care of themselves. Brace believed that a strong family life could help these victimized and neglected children, knew that the American pioneers who were settling the West could use help, and felt that an arrangement that would place children within these families would be mutually beneficial. He thought that the farmers in the West would welcome the children, take them in, and treat them as their own. Therefore, he arranged to send the orphaned children to pioneer families. The Orphan Trains and the practice of “placing children out” into homes that would accept them was the precursor to the modern foster care system in the United States.
