Orphan Trains

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As a CASA volunteer, you know that the system sometimes seems to perpetuate abuse and neglect rather than truly save children. Reading Orphan Trains will remind you that, however bad things may be now, they were worse in the past. We may have a terrible shortage of foster parents, and many of those who do take in our children may seem to be ill prepared to do the job, but the fact is that they are all screened, trained and supervised. It has not always been so.

In the mid 19th century, Charles Loring Brace started the Children’s Aid Society, a “faith based” organization devoted to helping poor children in New York. Brace was a minister who felt a mission to “save” the spunky, resourceful street urchins of the city. His Good Works took many forms, but the most dramatic were the Orphan Trains, in which boys and girls by the hundreds were sent off to the mid-west to be “adopted” by families they had never seen. Some of these families turned out to do a fine job with the youngsters they chose from the platform at the train station. Some of these boys and girls turned out to be responsive to and appreciative of the families they joined. But some of the families were exploitive and abusive, and some of the children were difficult or even delinquent. In short, the stories of the successes and failures of the orphan train children sound very much like the stories of foster children today. Two of the boys went on to become governors of western states. One became a murderer about the time he turned fifteen. Many were placed with a family which didn’t work out, then moved to another and another family until they finally lit out on their own or, in some cases, went back to New York.

Orphan Trains is as much about Charles Loring Brace as it is about the orphans. This is a wonderfully readable, fairly scholarly portrait of a 19th century idealist who tried to make a difference for children who had been abandoned and often abused. It is worth reading for the perspective it brings to the work we are doing for child welfare now, in the 21st century.

—Libby Colman, Ph.D.