All board... the Orphan Train
By Mark Cameron (Wilson County Texas Historian)
"The Orphan Train stopped in Floresville Texas. There was an orphanage out on FM 1303 called the Spruce Orphanage that the children would be taken to. As horrible we think it is...it was absolutely the most humane way to place homeless children at the time. The Great Grand Daughter of Joseph F Spruce said that J.F. Spruce was an affluent farmer in Wilson County that started the orphanage in Floresville. Come to find out, there were two separate locations of the orphanage. The first location was in Sunny Side. In 1910 they built a large 2 story house on FM 1303 close to CR 120 and moved out there. The WW2 Army Air Force auxiliary strip was on Mr. Spruces' land. There are not any remains of either house. The Spruces' over the years have sold the land."
"The Orphan Train stopped in Floresville Texas. There was an orphanage out on FM 1303 called the Spruce Orphanage that the children would be taken to. As horrible we think it is...it was absolutely the most humane way to place homeless children at the time. The Great Grand Daughter of Joseph F Spruce said that J.F. Spruce was an affluent farmer in Wilson County that started the orphanage in Floresville. Come to find out, there were two separate locations of the orphanage. The first location was in Sunny Side. In 1910 they built a large 2 story house on FM 1303 close to CR 120 and moved out there. The WW2 Army Air Force auxiliary strip was on Mr. Spruces' land. There are not any remains of either house. The Spruces' over the years have sold the land."
The United States' greatest and most ingenious feat of social engineering ever undertaken occurred between 1854 and 1929. For seventy five years, a relocation experiment of unprecedented scope relocated an estimated 350,000 orphaned, half-orphaned, neglected, abandoned, and abused children. These children were relocated from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other Eastern cities to Midwestern and Western states. This social engineering and mass relocation experiment was the brainchild of Charles Loring Brace, a Methodist minister from Yale, and is dubbed as "The Orphan Train Program". This program is the largest forced movement of individuals in our country's history and is the forerunner of our modern foster care programs.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Industrial Revolution sparked a mass immigration of foreigners mostly from Ireland, Italy, and Germany. The population in the United States grew by leaps and bounds. Upon the immigrant's arrival to the U.S., few jobs were available, there were no labor unions, no sick leave, no insurance, and no welfare. The continued immigration influx lead to low wages and appalling living conditions. Dangerous jobs meant numerous accidents and no safety net for those who suffered injuries and disabilities. New York's social structure buckled under the influx of immigrants. Many children were orphaned when their parents died in epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever or the flu. Households were often plagued by alcohol, violence and crime, and the parents were often unfit. This often left the parents unable or unwilling to provide for their children, so the children were put out on the streets to fend for themselves. On the streets, the children lived hand-to-mouth and often ran in gangs. Often these gangs would force small merchants to pay them "protection" fees. These destitute children were often called "street urchins" and "street rats" and battled for day-to-day survival. Many children on the streets turned to selling newspapers, selling flowers, singing songs, begging for food, or stealing to get by. Girls as young as 10 years old worked as prostitutes. Keep in mind there were few public orphanages, no foster care programs, no public social services, few church sponsored services, no social workers, no welfare programs, no food stamps, no health care for the poor. A popular current play in New York is called "Newsboys", and tells the story of these homeless boys selling newspapers trying to make any amount of money for food.
In 1849, a New York police chief's report stated that the children on the streets of New York accounted for a full one percent of the city's population. In 1850 an estimated 30,000 children were homeless in New York City. Homeless and neglected, these children lived in slums with little or no hope of a successful future. Often the only hope for "social services" for these poor and homeless children were the orphan asylums and almshouses. C.L. Brace felt that such institutions only deepened the dependence of the poor on charity. He also believed the best way to deal with crime and poverty was to prevent it. Brace focused on finding jobs and training for the poor and destitute children so they could help themselves. His initial efforts in social reform included free kindergartens, free dental clinics, job placement and training programs, reading rooms, and lodging for boys.
Charles Loring Brace envisioned a brighter future for these pauper and vagrant children. He believed that institutional care stunted and destroyed children. He believed by removing them from the poverty and debauchery of the city streets and placing them in morally upright and Christian farm families, they would have a chance of escaping a lifetime of street violence and suffering and become self-reliant citizens. Work was the answer, as he thought any boy with a trade would feel independence and would much less likely take up a dishonest means of living. He also knew that American pioneers could use help settling the American West. Young souls needed reform. Farmers needed workers. It was a marriage made in Heaven.
In 1853 C.L. Brace established the Children's Aid Society (CAS). Children relocated under this program were only sent to Protestant families. Later in 1869, the New York Foundling Hospital was established by Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon of the Sisters of Charity of New York as a shelter for abandoned infants. Children relocated under this program were only sent to Catholic families. These two institutions developed a program that placed, homeless, orphaned, and abandoned city children and infants in foster homes throughout the country. C.L. Brace proposed that these children be sent by train to live and work on farms out west. They would be placed in homes for free and serve as an extra set of hands to help with chores on the farms. The program ensured that the children would not be indentured. In fact, older children were to be paid for their labors. These trains that transported the children to their new futures, were called Orphan Trains. This process became known as "Placing Out" the children.
The CAS made special arrangements with the train companies to transport the children and special discounted fares were given. Now, these were not dedicated trains for the children. They were normal scheduled passenger trains which the children rode, usually in coach. Children would line up and board a westbound train in groups from three up to forty (some accounts say up to one hundred), accompanied by two agents from the society. Prior to departure, the children were bathed, given new clothes, a coat, often a Bible, and reminded of good manners. Local town organizers would create interest in the children's arrival by advertising with notices, circulars and posters, informing residents when the children would arrive and of the viewing location. When the trains stopped, the children were paraded from the train depot into a local opera house or play house, a school, or town hall, for the community to meet and interview the children. At these locations, the children were put up on stage, thus the origin of the term "up for adoption". Up on the stage, the children would give their names, perhaps sing a little ditty, or say a piece. Not so pleasant showings also occurred which resembled slave auctions. People would come along and prod and feel the children, and see how many teeth they had.
The demand for child labor was fierce, with many trains visiting the same towns over and over. One Kansas town had 150 families wanting to adopt, or take in, fourteen children. Fights almost broke out on the Kansas town streets because there were so many people wanting these children. In other towns, the children not selected were escorted back on the train and taken to the next stop, often enduring tearful separation from their siblings. The process continued until all the children were gone. The train companies suffered severe disruptions in their schedules while they allowed the "placing out" process to finish so they could move on to the next town.
By today's standards, the process by which children were gathered and disbursed was frightful. Screening of the children and recipient families was minimal and often ignored. Home placement was the result of interested families picking who they liked when a trainload of children arrived in town. Although the demand for the children was motivated by a need for labor, the Children's Aid Society took measures to ensure the children were well cared for. Many of the children were used as forced child labor, but there are stories of children ending up in families that loved them, cherished them, and educated them.
Families applying to take children had to be endorsed by local business owners, doctors, and journalists. According to the CAS terms, boys under twelve were to be treated by the applicants as one of their own children in matters of schooling, clothing, and training, and boys twelve to fifteen were to be sent to a school a part of each year. Representatives from CAS would visit each family once a year to check conditions, and children were expected to write letters back to the society twice a year.
The arrangements for placing orphan children varied. Sometimes they were pre-ordered by couples; at other times a local screening committee tried to make sure the children would be given to good parents; at other times the process was random.
The first orphan train left New York on September 20, 1854 with 46 ten to twelve year old boys and girls bound for Dowagiac, Michigan. In January 1855 the society sent out two more orphan trains to Pennsylvania. In the early years, Indiana received the largest number of children. Orphan trains continued to transport children to 45 different states including Texas. One account says a Mrs. Evans from Kentucky brought 19 orphans to Floresville, Wilson Co., TX in 1907 to the orphan home ran by Joseph F. Spruce.
The Orphan Train Program continued to "place out" children until 1929, when the New York Legislature passed a law ending the movement of New York orphans out of state. The onset of the depression made it extremely difficult for families to consider "adding another mouth to feed", and foster care homes were beginning to replace the large orphanages of the past. The last orphan train carried three boys to new lives in Texas in 1929, long after the death of innovator Charles Loring Brace. Brace, who died in 1890, is acclaimed as the most influential child saver of the 19the century. His legacy triumphs Christian family over orphanages.
Braces' unusual and controversial idea of "placing out" children by trains to farms was unprecedented and was the largest social engineering experiment ever conducted. The orphan trains were needed at the time they happened. They were not the best answer, but they were the first attempts at finding a practical system for an out of control problem. Many children that would have died, lived to have children and grandchildren. The orphan trains gave these children a fighting chance to grow up in a stable and Christian family. Braces' Orphan Train Program and other Children's Aid initiatives led to a host of child welfare reforms, including child labor laws, adoption and the establishment of foster care services, public education, the provision of health care and nutrition and vocational training. The last generation of Orphan Train riders is still living in towns across the United States. The "National Orphan Train Complex and Museum" estimates that only 30 original train riders are still alive as of June 2016. They keep in touch with each other through the "National Orphan Train Complex" and through Children's Aid. Based in Concordia, Kansas, the "Orphan Train Heritage Society of America" helps members establish and maintain family contacts, retrace their roots and preserve the history of the Orphan Train Movement.
