![]() ![]() And many teenage boys and girls went to orphan train sponsoring organizations simply in search of work or a free ticket out of the city. Children with both parents living ended up on the trains - or in orphanages - because their families did not have the money or desire to raise them or because they had been abused or abandoned or had run away. ![]() One reason the term was not used by placement agencies was that less than half of the children who rode the trains were in fact orphans, and as many as 25 percent had two living parents. Widespread use of the term "orphan train" may date to 1978, when CBS aired a fictional miniseries entitled The Orphan Trains. Organizations and families generally used the terms "family placement" or "out-placement" ("out" to distinguish it from the placement of children "in" orphanages or asylums) to refer to orphan train passengers. Later, the New York Foundling Hospital sent out what it called "baby" or "mercy" trains. The Children's Aid Society referred to its relevant division first as the Emigration Department, then as the Home-Finding Department, and finally, as the Department of Foster Care. However, the term "Orphan Train" was not widely used until long after the Orphan Train program had ended. The phrase "orphan train" was first used in 1854 to describe the transportation of children from their home area via the railroad. Īfter a year of dispatching children individually to farms in nearby Connecticut, Pennsylvania and rural New York, the Children's Aid Society mounted its first large-scale expedition to the Midwest in September 1854. His program would turn out to be a forerunner of modern foster care. Recognizing the need for labor in the expanding farm country, Brace believed that farmers would welcome homeless children, take them into their homes and treat them as their own. īrace believed that street children would have better lives if they left the poverty and debauchery of their lives in New York City and were instead raised by morally upright farm families. Brace hit on the idea of sending groups of children to rural areas for adoption. Brace and his colleagues attempted to find jobs and homes for individual children, but they soon became overwhelmed by the numbers needing placement. Eventually, the society established the nation's first runaway shelter, the Newsboys' Lodging House, where vagrant boys received inexpensive room and board and basic education. During its first year the Children's Aid Society primarily offered boys religious guidance and vocational and academic instruction. In 1853, a young minister named Charles Loring Brace became concerned with the plight of street children (often known as "street Arabs"). For protection against street violence, they banded together and formed gangs. Many children sold matches, rags, or newspapers to survive. Others were abandoned due to poverty, illness, or addiction. Some children were orphaned when their parents died in epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever or the flu. At the time, New York City's population was only 500,000. In 1850, there were an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 homeless children in New York City. Īround 1830, the number of homeless children in large Eastern cities such as New York City exploded. Arrangements were informal and rarely involved courts. Relatives or neighbors usually raised children who had lost their parents. The first orphanage in the United States was reportedly established in 1729 in Natchez, MS, but institutional orphanages were uncommon before the early 19th century. This relocation of children ended in the 1920s with the beginning of organized foster care in America. The children were transported to their new homes on trains that were labeled "orphan trains" or "baby trains". The three institutions developed a program that placed homeless, orphaned, and abandoned city children, who numbered an estimated 30,000 in New York City alone in the 1850s, in foster homes throughout the country. ORPHAN TRAIN MOVIE PROFESSIONALThe institutions were supported by wealthy donors and operated by professional staff. Three charitable institutions, Children's Village (founded 1851 by 24 philanthropists), the Children's Aid Society (established 1853 by Charles Loring Brace) and later, the New York Foundling Hospital, endeavored to help these children. They were mostly the children of new immigrants and the children of the poor and destitute families living in these cities. The co-founders of the Orphan Train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but this was not always true. The orphan trains operated between 18, relocating about 250,000 children. The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. ![]()
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