Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Domestics were usually unmarried women in the transition between living with their parents and starting a family of their own. They were almost all under thirty and were commonly as young as fourteen. Farmhands were also generally unmarried and often even younger. In the nineteenth century it was still relatively easy for a laborer to become a landowner. By their early twenties, most young men in the country were renting land and, within a few years, had farms of their own. As a result, farmhands tended to be sixteen- to twenty-year-old boys,4 and with so many new farms constantly starting up, there was a terrible shortage of people to work them—a fact that played an important role in Brace’s original conception and in farmers’ acceptance of the orphan trains.

  As much as the presence of extra children in the nineteenth-century household shows the Victorian family’s capacity to absorb outsiders, it also illustrates its susceptibility to dissolution. Little Orphan Annie or her brother would generally end up living with other families as a result of some sort of catastrophe—although that catastrophe need not have entailed orphanhood. Throughout the nineteenth century, between 20 and 30 percent of children became orphans before age fifteen,5 but only one-third of the children living in orphanages had lost both parents. Nearly 60 percent of those children were what was called “half orphans”—only one parent dead—and 10 percent of them still had two living parents.6 These figures illustrate the extent to which poor Victorian families used orphanages as places to park their children during family crises. A substantial proportion of children in orphanages were there only for a year or two, and then were taken back into their birth families once the crisis had passed. It was common, for example, for a father to place his children in an orphanage after the death of his wife and to bring them home when he remarried, or when they were old enough to look after themselves while he worked. It was also common for children to be placed in an orphanage simply because their parents could not afford to feed and clothe them; maybe the father had lost his job or could not work because of illness or injury. These children were usually brought back home as soon as economic circumstances improved.

  But orphanages were almost always a last resort, even when a child had lost both parents. Most poor children whose mothers and fathers could not care for them were sent to live with grandparents, aunts, uncles, or family friends (just as the children of the poor often are today), or jobs were obtained for them. But none of these informal “placements” were necessarily permanent. Even when a child had been officially indentured, parents could exercise their right to bring the child home once the family crisis had passed, although they might have had to engage in some legal negotiation and/or pay the master a fee.

  The stability and freedom from anxiety that many modern idealists like to impose on the Victorian family are actually artifacts of comparatively recent developments, such as the plummeting of the mortality rate (by the mid-1970s only 5 percent of children were orphans7) and the elaboration of the laws, programs, and institutions that we have come to call the “safety net.” In the early days of capitalism and wage labor, workers were almost entirely unprotected from the expansion and contraction of the job market or from the economic consequences of illness or disability. Men and women were constantly being let go because of seasonal or cyclical dips in demand, as well as for a host of other reasons that are still common today. Fathers and sons were constantly leaving their families to find jobs in other neighborhoods, in other cities, in the country, or at sea. Pioneers and immigrants were far from the only ones on the move during the nineteenth century. They were in fact only engaging in a more extreme form of the universal migration of working people in quest of a means of earning a living.

  All of which goes to say that when Charles Loring Brace publicized his intention to find places in the country for city children, many of the people who first participated in the venture saw nothing particularly radical about it. For the farmers, it was just another way of getting needed labor; for poor parents, it was just another place to park children during hard times; and for the older teenagers at least, it was just another employment service. Similar services had long existed in the city. In a process very like an orphan train auction, for example, girls who wanted jobs as maids would sit together in the back room of a domestic employment agency and wait for gentlemen and ladies to pick them out and take them home. Young men also found laboring jobs through such auction-like arrangements, though theirs might take place on a street corner or at a dockside and, in the city at least, they were not usually required to live with their employer.

  These were the patterns of labor, migration, and family organization that, in a remarkably flexible and undogmatic fashion, the CAS, through the Emigration Plan in particular, helped to facilitate during its earliest decades.

  Practically from the day Brace first moved a desk, chair, paper, and pens into the CAS’s Amity Street offices, he was trying to find “places” for poor children. On March 7, 1853, he provided a “bright lad just down from the country” and living “in very great destitution” with dinner at his own lodgings and then found him “a bed with a poor family” and a job at the New York Sun. A day later he found a newsboy a “place in Christopher Street with Lyons, a carriage black-smith.” On March 10 he found a job for a boy named “Dealy” at the Metropolitan Bank, where John E. Williams, the CAS treasurer, was president.8

  But Brace was never very happy about placing children in the city. From the beginning his main goal was to find them rural homes. And he seems sincerely to have maintained an almost startlingly idealized portrait of country folk. “[T]he cultivators of the soil are in America our most solid and intelligent class,” he wrote. “They like to educate their own ‘help.’ With their overflowing supply of food also, each new mouth in the household brings no drain on their means. Children are a blessing, and the mere feeding of a young boy or girl is not considered at all.”9 This idealized image was supported by a host of Romantic notions about the purity of lives lived close to the soil, but it was also based on the fact that while rural poverty could be severe, it lacked the concentration and intensity that made the nation’s still new-seeming slums so horrifically squalid, dangerous, unsanitary, and, as Brace saw it, prone to immorality. In effect, when he finally got his Emigration Plan up and running, he would be using the grandest symbol of nineteenth-century modernity—the railroad—to send children back in time to an agrarian America where there were no slums and no throngs of harried, disheveled, and disoriented immigrants, and where human relationships, even within the nuclear family, had not been degraded by an economic system that saw profit as the only value.

  Brace’s campaign for rural placement began in earnest in late March 1853 when he ran an advertisement in newspapers near New York City describing the CAS and asking to hear from anyone who might have a job or home to offer an orphan or vagrant child. The response was almost immediate. His “Daily Journal” entry for April 6 begins: “Many applications from the country.” And for April 9: “Business. Application for boys and girls from country.”

  Not every child who came to the CAS looking for work was willing to accept a rural placement. One boy turned down a “home in the country” because he thought the man he would be sent to might “want to sell him”10 Most often children refused to go to the country because they did not want to stray so far from their families and friends. Brace would not make his first rural placement until April 19, when he sent two boys to upstate New York, one to Wolcottville and the other to Woodstock.

  Most of the applications from the country were submitted by people offering jobs, but many were from couples looking for children to adopt, often because their own offspring had died. The CAS also received applications from Henry Higgins types who, as Brace described one such gentleman from Delaware, “wished to make the experiment of bringing up a vagrant boy of the city.”11 During that first year Brace and his assistant, John Macy, found places for 207 children. In the second year they placed more than four times as many—863, a
mong whom were the first 46 orphan train riders.12

  In the era before telephones and cars, the placement of individual children was immensely time-consuming and inefficient—especially when it had to be managed by only two men. As Brace explained it in his book The Dangerous Classes:

  Each applicant or employer always called for “a perfect child,” without any of the taints of earthly depravity. The girls must be pretty, good-tempered, not given to purloining sweetmeats, and fond of making fires at daylight, and with a constitutional love for Sunday Schools and Bible-lessons. The boys must be well made, of good stock, never disposed to steal apples or pelt cattle, using language of perfect propriety, and delighting in family-worship and prayer-meetings more than in fishing or skating parties. These demands, of course, were not always successfully complied with. Moreover, to those who desired the children of “blue eyes, fair hair, and blond complexion,” we were sure to send the dark-eyed and brunette; and the particular virtues wished for were very often precisely those that the child was deficient in. It was evidently altogether too much of a lottery for bereaved parents or benevolent employers to receive children in that way.13

  Individual placement also required an immense amount of money—for staffing, filing, correspondence, and transportation—something that was in very short supply, especially during the society’s first decade.

  By accepting the position of CAS secretary, Brace had put himself in exactly the position of dependency he had dreaded for so much of his life; he was compelled, time and again, in the presence of his wealthiest friends and acquaintances, to adopt the survival strategy of the very children he was trying to help. “No such disagreeable and self-denying work is ever done as begging money,” he admitted in The Dangerous Classes.

  The feeling that you are boring others, and getting from their personal regard, what ought to be given solely for public motives, and the certainty that others will apply to you as you apply to them, and expect a subscription as a personal return, are all great “crosses.” The cold rebuff, too; the suspicious negative, as if you were engaged in rather doubtful business, are other unpleasant accompaniments of this business.14

  Despite all of Brace’s groveling and enthusiasm, to say nothing of his double-barreled strategy of appealing to the compassion and fear of the wealthy, the society was only barely able to scrape by until it began to receive state aid in 1862. Then, as now, most “practical” men were convinced that there was not much return from money invested in the reformation of the children of the poor.

  Brace was well aware of the limited generosity of the wealthy. He also knew that however much he may have disagreed with the theories behind orphanages, asylums, and other institutions for the care of poor children, one of the main reasons they rarely lived up to their founders’ expectations was that they almost never received the funding necessary to run as they had been planned. This was why so many state almshouses put elderly and, often, alcoholic inmates in charge of their children’s wards instead of paid and trained staff. This was why a New York State investigation of county almshouses in the 1850s found that “common domestic animals are usually more humanely provided for” than almshouse inmates, and that “the children are poorly fed, poorly clothed, and quite untaught.”15 Underfunding also explained why, during the same period, the Massachusetts State Reform School for Boys housed more than double its capacity; and why, at a time when New York City’s child mortality rate was hovering around 20 percent, the unsanitary and overcrowded Infant’s Hospital on Randall’s Island lost between 70 and 77 percent of the children put in its care.16

  Dreading that his own charity could be similarly compromised by insufficient funding, Brace took great pains from the beginning to ensure that it required as little money to operate as possible. By 1864 the number of children placed annually by the CAS had grown to over 1,000, and during the last quarter of the century placements averaged between 3,000 and 4,000 annually. Sending these children out west in groups and letting interested men and women simply pick out the boy or girl they liked best was enormously cheaper and faster than placing each child individually. Because the CAS did not have to play the role of middleman, it did not have to hire a large staff or spend a lot of money on correspondence. Transportation was also cheaper since the charity could take advantage of discounted group rates. And letting families (or “employers”) pick out their own child limited the amount of time, money, and heartache spent replacing children whose eyes might turn out to be the wrong shade of blue, or who had no fondness for starting fires at six in the morning.

  Brace made a point of advertising the Emigration Plan’s efficiency to economy-minded potential contributors, emphasizing that in addition to being the most effective and humane method for reforming poor children, placing them in homes was also the cheapest. It cost $140 per year to keep a criminal in jail, for example, while it took only a onetime payment of under $20 to find a poor child a home through the Emigration Plan.17

  The final factor contributing to the apparent inevitability of the orphan trains was the economics of the burgeoning railroad industry. In their early days one of the biggest problems faced by railroad companies was a destination shortage. Firm believers that America’s destiny lay beyond the Appalachians, railroad entrepreneurs were extending veinlike networks of tracks westward from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and eastward from San Francisco into a vast territory where, especially west of Chicago, the few cities were really only small towns and the widely scattered settlements might be inhabited by no more than a handful of families. History was on the side of the railroad entrepreneurs, of course. The same forces that were overcrowding the great cities of the East Coast would inevitably fill up the forests, prairies, and plains of the Heartland. But the entrepreneurs could not wait that long. They had loans to repay and stockholders to satisfy—so they decided to give history a hand.

  Their strategy was simple: rather than wait for destinations to emerge by themselves, the railroad entrepreneurs manufactured them. On swaths of land along their tracks that they either had been given by the federal government or had bought for practically nothing, they laid out grids of streets, built post offices, established general stores, blacksmiths, and maybe a newspaper and a church. Then they offered residential and commercial plots to settlers at bargain-basement prices.

  To get a sufficient number of people interested in settling on these plots, the railroad companies employed that most venerable of American types: the huckster. Often in collaboration with the governments of western states and territories, the railroads would send agents to East Coast cities to sing the praises of their blueprint communities. These agents would come fortified with brochures, guides, maps, and street plans that often considerably exaggerated the state of development and bucolic splendor of the new communities, and of the West in general. Railroad agents, again often in collaboration with western states and territories, were also sent to Europe, where they traveled from village to village promoting their “product” in very much the same way as domestic agents, but there they also tried to attract large groups of neighbors to emigrate all at once. To sweeten their deals, both domestic and European agents would offer deeply discounted group fares—called “emigrant tickets”—not only for train travel but also for freshwater steamship trips and, for Europeans, transatlantic passage.

  If not partly inspired by the railroad company policies, Brace’s Emigration Plan was certainly a similarly self-conscious attempt to participate in and advance an already existing demographic phenomenon. The railroad company discounts also made it easier for Brace to put his own plan into action. And when the Children’s Aid Society’s first official company of “western emigrants,” under the supervision of a young “visitor” named E. P. Smith, left New York City, it took full advantage of the discounts offered by the railroads.

  No surviving records indicate why Dowagiac, a small town in southwest Michigan, was chosen as the destination for this first orphan train. In th
e future the CAS would primarily send parties of children to well-established towns situated in the midst of prosperous farm country, with 3,000 to 4,000 inhabitants, good schools, and, ideally, a college nearby. Dowagiac in 1853 had few if any of these advantages. The settlement had only been “platted,” or laid out, by the Michigan Central Railroad in February 1848, and it would not be incorporated as a village for another fifteen years. Its homes, described by one traveler as “rock eggs on the desert sand,”18 consisted mostly of cabins made of squared-off logs, although some of its finer buildings may have been built from clapboard or brick hauled in by freight trains. It had a tavern with rooms to let to travelers, a railroad station, a post office, and at least one church—Presbyterian—which doubled as a school from late fall to early spring. Its streets were dirt, its yards mostly bare. The “primeval forests” of oak, beech, and maple that once covered the land had been cleared away to build houses, make room for fields of wheat and livestock, and provide firewood to settlers and the railroad. It was not a particularly prosperous town, but no one was starving. Most farmers were able to grow or make everything they needed.