The orphan trains are among the
most famous episodes in adoption history. Between 1854 and 1929,
as many as 250,000 children from New York and other Eastern cities
were sent by train to towns in midwestern and western states, as
well as Canada and Mexico. Families interested in the orphans showed
up to look them over when they were placed on display in local train
stations, and placements were frequently made with little or no
investigation or oversight.
This ambitious and controversial project in the relocation of a
massive child population was emblematic of the move toward placing-out.
Organized by the New York Childrens Aid Society and directed
by well known reformer Charles Loring
Brace, the orphan trains were based on the theory that the innocent
children of poor Catholic and Jewish immigrants could be rescued
and Americanized if they were permanently removed from depraved
urban surroundings and placed with upstanding Anglo-Protestant farming
families. This evangelical humanitarianism echoed more than a century
later, after World War II, when people like Bertha
and Harry Holt made international
adoptions more visible and common.
In spite of the trains' stated intention, they did not permanently
separate most children, geographically or culturally, from their
parents and communities of origin. Well into the twentieth century,
impoverished but resourceful parents took advantage of the services
of middle-class child-savers for their own purposes, including temporary
caretaking during periods of economic crisis and apprenticeships
that helped children enter the labor market. Reformers like Brace
were determined to salvage the civic potential of poor immigrant
children by placing them in culturally “worthy” families
while simultaneously reducing urban poverty and crime and supplying
some of the workers that western development required. But poor
parents had no intention of losing track of their children, and
they usually did not, even in the case of very young children placed
permanently for “adoption.” Historians who have studied
the records of the Childrens Aid Society closely have concluded
that the largest number of orphan train children were temporarily
transferred or shared, not given up.
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