'Orphan Train' reveals origins of U.S. foster care

'Orphan Train' reveals origins of U.S. foster care

August 06, 2010 11:31:00 PM
By Nancy Pasternack/Appeal-Democrat
He doesn't know a thing about his grandmother's beginnings. But Olivehurst resident John Leeder is sure her life was not a happy one.

As a small child, she had been placed on what became known as The Orphan Train.

Between 1854 and 1929, more than 200,000 orphaned and abandoned children boarded railway cars in Boston and New York City and were distributed at train stations across America — given away to practically anyone who would have them.

Leeder, 60, has never learned which stop was his grandmother's final destination.

"My mom never knew what state she had lived in," Leeder says.

This evening, writer/humanities scholar Alison Moore, and musician/audio-visual technician Phil Lancaster, both of Austin, Texas, will perform a multimedia show in Marysville called, "Riders on the Orphan Train."

The combination of music, storytelling and video is designed to bring awareness to this little-known chapter of American history.

Moore, a former assistant professor of Engish/creative writing at the University of Arizona, has developed public outreach programs for the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America Inc., and performed since 1998 with Lancaster in more than 500 museums, libraries and schools in Arkansas, Texas and Arizona.

The story of the Orphan Train Movement is recognized as the beginning of documented foster care in America.

The program was initiated by reformer Charles Loving Brace, operator of New York City's Children's Aid Society.

On farms, and in rural towns across the country, he believed destitute children living in the streets and orphanages in Northeast urban centers could have room, food, safety and schooling, according to a Website for the National Orphan Train Complex Inc. in Concordia, Kan.

A letter published in the Cleveland Morning Leader in April 1857 describes a typical scenario in East Coast cities during the Industrial Revolution as "the saddest procession ... composed of the children of poverty, vice, crime and degradation ..."

"These neglected, suffering, crushed little ones appeal to us as no other can," it continues.

But for many of those orphans taken at train depots across the country, the dream of life with loving parents, was in fact, merely a life of indentured servitude.

Leeder believes his own grandmother suffered brutal abuse at the hands of her guardian.

"I hope most of the other (orphan train riders') stories were happy ones," he says. "But I wonder how many, like my grandmother, got used."

She gave birth at a young age to Leeder's mother, who at age 10, also became an orphan when Leeder's grandmother died of pneumonia.

It was 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, and until that time, Leeder says, "she never went to school a day in her life and never owned a toothbrush."

After three years in an orphanage, she was adopted and taken to live on a farm in Mississippi, where her luck turned around for the better, Leeder says.

A friend attempted to do some family research on the subject, he says.

The work was difficult because few orphan train riders had documents to identify a date and place of birth, let alone parents.

'Riders of the Orphan train'

WHEN: 7 p.m. today

WHERE: St. John's Episcopal Church, Eighth and D streets, Marysville

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