encyclopedia of adoption
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Placing Out: The Orphan Train
Experts estimate over 10,000 homeless children roamed the streets of New York City in the mid1800s, living on the ill-gotten gains from crimes they committed. Police reports in New York City in 1852 revealed that in I 1 wards, 2,000 homeless girls ages 8 to 16 were arrested for theft. Things only got worse: According to author Francis Lane in his 1932 doctoral dissertation for the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., there were 5,880 commitments of female children for vagrancy in 1860.
Part of the problem was that there was almost no need for "honest labor" of children in the large cities, which was why the children had turned to dishonest labor. (This was prior to the child labor movement, and at this time, everyone worked.) Large numbers of immigrants streamed into the major cities of the Northeast, such as New York City, between 1847 and 1860.
There was insufficient demand for the labor of this huge influx of adults, let alone children. But at the same time, the midwestern and western farmers suffered a severe labor shortage.
Social reformers such as Charles Loring Brace, founder of the New York Children's Aid Society, saw almshouses and indenture as the problem, not the solution, and Brace initiated the Orphan Train movement in the mid-1850s. Brace believed that sending children to distant families would solve two problems: the family's desire for a child and the child's need for a family.
An estimated 150,000 children from the Northeast traveled to the Midwest, West and South to foster or adoptive homes from 1854 until the movement ended in about 1929, when the Great Depression hit the entire United States very hard, especially farmers. (Some of these children were not placed by the New York Children's Aid Society, Brace's organization, but were actually indentured by other agencies.)
From 1854 to 1929, these homeless children were placed on trains and taken to rural sites concentrated in the Midwest and West in search of rural homes where the children could five and work. The children ranged from as young as about one year old to age 16 or 17.
Limited follow-ups of the children revealed that then, as now, the children who adapted the most readily were usually the younger children, and the older teenagers faced the greatest difficulty in adjusting to a radically different environment.
Most of the children were poor, and some had been involved in minor or serious infractions of the law. Many also had siblings and were separated from them for fife as a result of the Move_ Yet most of the children (including two later governors-Andrew Burke of North Dakota and John Brady of the Alaska Territory-and other prominent citizens) made successful new lives for themselves, leaving behind them severe poverty and desolation.
Brace was initially supported in his movement by organizations within the Catholic Church and other groups. The Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul and the New York Foundling Hospital, for example, were both actively involved in the Orphan Train movement. The movement was also known as the "Placing Out" program and preceded adoption as we know it today. (It is unknown how many of the children received de facto family membership.)
The children left the train at each stop and were chosen or not chosen by people who carte to the station to see them. The children were "put tip" on platforms for all to see, which is supposedly the source of the phrase "put up for adoption."
Critics questioned whether all the homeless children Brace sent off on the orphan trains were really without parents or relatives and challenged whether or not sufficient checking and safeguards were made of parental rights. Notice to birthparents was not required, and consequently, there were parents who might (and did) object to their children being "placed out."
In addition, most of the homeless children were from Jewish or Catholic immigrant parents, yet large numbers were placed by Brace in Protestant homes. Laws were subsequently created in many states, including New York, that mandated or strongly suggested religious matching, so that children of Catholic parents would be placed only with Catholic adoptive parents, Jews with Jews and so forth.
Critics also said Brace made insufficient investigations of the foster or adoptive homes and little follow-up or documentation. In Brace's defense, communications and transportation systems of his era had little resemblance to our society today: lie could not just pick up the phone and contact someone in the Midwest nor could he send or receive tax messages or E-mail.
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©2000 by Christine Adamec and William Pierce, Ph.D. Reprinted from The Encyclopedia of Adoption, 2nd Edition (2nd Edition) with permission of Facts On File, Inc.
