Although fiction, the story line is based upon a part of our history that now seems eerie and perhaps even repugnant. For about 75 years, from 1854 to 1929, several charitable institutions in New York City thought they could best help a large number of urchin children — orphans and victims of abject poverty and domestic abuse — by shipping them by train to the Midwest and hoping they would be adopted by families on farms and the prairies.
The book is good in a literary sense, but its real value may be that it opened our eyes to this segment of our country’s history. While the descendants of these orphans have formed support groups to exchange stories and expand their family histories, the rest of us have had few opportunities to learn about this misguided social experiment.
These orphan trains were not delivering children to families who had already agreed to adopt them. They were more like cattle cars, stopping at rural depots where the children were herded off so that locals could inspect and perhaps claim them — often for what might turn out to be serfdom and servitude. Once claimed, some families were very caring and those children prospered. But other families sometimes treated them as second-class children, in terms of food, clothing, chores and schooling. Some families changed their names without legally adopting them, thereby foreclosing the children from any inheritance and making them virtually impossible to track.
Perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 abandoned children were sent west. Anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 children were claimed by families in Ohio. It is only in recent years that descendants of these orphans, helped by Google and other internet tentacles, have sought out their true identity and family origins.
One hundred years ago, adoptions were often awarded to anyone who said they were willing to take care of the child. In my own family, my second cousin, Marie, was adopted in 1922 by my great uncle Charlie and his wife, Minnie, when Charlie was already 57. They wanted to adopt a child in thanksgiving for Minnie’s miraculous recovery from death-defying surgery. All they needed to adopt Marie was a letter from their priest. Marie was adopted the same day as her new parents first visited St. Monica’s Founding Home in Sioux City.
Certainly, that adoption was wonderful for Marie, and she and I often talked about it over the years. But, even at that, her adoption illustrated how fast and easy it was to adopt children 100 years ago — almost as easy as it was to claim a child off an orphan train. Maybe those standards worked then, but they would not work in today’s world.
When we compare the in-depth adoption procedures of today to the rough and ready hand-offs from the orphan trains, we begin to realize how far we have advanced as a culture and as a country. Adoptions are still critically important today. Perhaps the real lesson we can take from “The Orphan Train” is that the book shows how important it is now, as it should have been 100 years ago, to investigate prospective adoptive parents and to monitor adoptions to insure that the quality of the child’s new life is validated. That will validate their future, and our future.
About the Author