Go west, young orphan

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be small differences between the text and the audio you hear above.**

ED: Most of our images of child migrants had to do with this kind of journey to America. But for nearly 75 years, small children were shipped, often on their own, hundreds of miles within this country. It was a program known as the Orphan Train. A man named Charles Loring Brace conceived of the idea in the 1850s, for reasons similar to those we just heard about in our last piece.

In cities like New York, there were tens of thousands of orphaned and homeless children living on the streets. And, as it turned out, as American farmers settled the Midwest, they needed extra hands to help run their farms. Supply and demand would intersect, the idea was, resulting in better lives for children.

PETER: The Children’s Aid Society, the group founded by Brace, joined with other aid organizations to send upwards of 200,000 children to new homes out west. Many of these kids did wind up in better circumstances and thrived. Two of them went on to be governors. But for others, the outcome was considerably less rosy.

We got our hands on some tape of interviews with some of the last generation of orphan train riders, tape that reflects this mixed legacy. And we’re going to play for you now a sampling of stories from the orphan train.

MALE SPEAKER: I remembered sitting in the train with a little teddy bear in my arms. That’s all I remember.

MALE SPEAKER: I came to Iowa in the year of 1919, when I was eight years old.

MALE SPEAKER: I rode the orphan train December 1922.

MALE SPEAKER: It was around 20 orphanages just in New York City alone.

MALE SPEAKER: I had been found in a basket in Gimbels Department Store on January the 12th, 1918. The authorities estimated my age to be a little bit over a month old. And so they set me a birth date of December the 2nd, 1917.

MALE SPEAKER: My father, after losing his wife, took my brother to his grandmother’s. She couldn’t keep both of us, so he took me to the orphanage. I was there for five years. And when I was eight years old, they put me on the train.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Oh, yeah, I remember the train. There were three of us girls were ordered, as they called it, from some ladies in Nebraska.

FEMALE SPEAKER: And I had my name tag, and it had my name and address of where I was going, like a package.

MALE SPEAKER: They told me that we were going to find a home, a mommy and a daddy.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Some of them cry and didn’t want to go, and some were happy to go.

MALE SPEAKER: And, boy, here I’d heard about mommy and daddy recently, but this sounded real intriguing.

MALE SPEAKER: I think we each one got a quarter when we left New York. Most of them spent them for candy bars on the way.

MALE SPEAKER: Took us three days to get to our destination. We’d hear whoo whoo whoo, that sort of thing. So we got quite familiar with that. We got very familiar with the clackety clackety clackety clack of the wheels. It was a lot of fun.

FEMALE SPEAKER: When I got off the train, these strangers picked me up and put me sleeping between them, the husband and wife, during the night, and I shook all night long. I wasn’t sleeping, I was shaking. I was three.

MALE SPEAKER: And they took us off the train in the center of a large farm country, where they raised a lot of corn, and livestock, and pigs and chickens, and all that sort of thing. We walked up to the United Methodist Church.

MALE SPEAKER: And we formed a half a circle, the 12 of us. And the farmers came in and picked us out.

MALE SPEAKER: There was a huge crowd of people. And they came from as much as 40 miles away. They came with wagons and horses and this sort of thing which was customary at that time.

FEMALE SPEAKER: And my foster mother had to sign papers before she could take us on.

MALE SPEAKER: They didn’t have to adopt us. You signed a contract. Keep you clothed and fed and send you to church and school. And when you got to 16, they had to hire you if they could.

MALE SPEAKER: I apparently got up on a man’s lap and asked him if he’s going to be my daddy. Turns out he was. The first thing they did when I arrived that day was hand me a little bucket. They sent me out to a building out here and said, go gather the eggs. Gather the eggs? I never gathered an egg in my life. Didn’t know hardly what an egg was, except they were good. So that was my first job on a farm.

MALE SPEAKER: They treated me just like I was their own son. They were very fine people.

FEMALE SPEAKER: My foster mother, she kept slapping me in the mouth all the time because I wasn’t talking like them. I had the New York accent, see? She keeps slapping me until I said the words like she did. And then by the time I’m 11, she says, well, I don’t want you anymore. I’m going to send you back.

MALE SPEAKER: I got a pretty nice family to go to, but this woman didn’t know how to take care of children. She didn’t have none of her own. But after she got pregnant, they wanted to send me back.

This woman up the road a ways on the farm, she said, I’ll take him. And just bring him up to my place. And everything changed that day. She just felt sorry for me, I think. She was a good mother.

MALE SPEAKER: You know, my frustration is, who am I? What am I? What is my heritage? What do I have in my body or my mind that was transported down from my ancestors?

INTERVIEWER: So are you at all bitter finding out that your father gave you up like that?

MALE SPEAKER: No. I wouldn’t have liked it in New York. I say there’s no place like Iowa. It’s home.

PETER: Those were voices of men and women who rode the orphan train. They were recorded by Annie Wu, Andrea Warren, and Lisa Lipkin, formerly with the Museum of the City of New York. Special thanks also to Renee Wendinger, author of Last Train Home and The Orphan Trains and News Boys of New York. Andrea Warren’s books are We Rode the Orphan Trains and Orphan Train Rider. We’ll post the links to those books and to Annie Wu’s one-hour radio special about the trains at backstoryradio.org.

[MUSIC – PAPERBOYS, “LONESOME TRAVELLER”]

ED: That’s going to do it for us today, but we’re eager to hear your family’s stories about children starting over in America. Leave us a comment at backstoryradio.org, or send us an email. Our address is backstory@virginia.edu. We tweet @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, and Robert Armengol. Emily Gadek is our digital producer, and Jamal Millner is our engineer. We had help from Coly Elhai. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks this week to Michael Henderson and Joyce Martin.

PETER: We also want to extend a special welcome this week to our new listeners on KCLU in Santa Barbara, WCQS in Asheville, North Carolina, and KRCU in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Glad to have you on board.

[MUSIC – PAPERBOYS, “LONESOME TRAVELLER”]

ED: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund– cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment– and by History Channel. History made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.