Homeless Children Ride Orphan Train to Texas

The last “Orphan Train” left New York City on May 31, 1929 bound for Sulphur Springs and points west ln the Lone Star State.

Charles Loring Brace was a college-educated minister and social reformer working in the slums of New York City in the middle of the nineteenth century. A person of rare compassion, he was moved most by the plight of the 30,000 homeless children forced to fend for themselves in the metropolis of half a million.

There were many reasons why waifs as young as six wound up on the street in those days. Some were sent by unfit parents to beg for money from better-off strangers or to sell them newspapers and matches. Others were actual orphans, who had lost their parents to violence or disease, while still others had been abandoned by the very people that had brought them into the world.

Brace decided at the age of 26 to devote his life to those children most New Yorkers called “street rats.” He could have opened another orphanage or soup kitchen, but the far-sighted idealist felt such well-intentioned institutions instilled a lifelong dependence on charity.

Brace sought instead to help homeless youth become self-sufficient adults able to stand on their own two feet. That was the guiding mission of the Children’s Aid Society the clergyman founded in 1853.

The CAS began by tending to the urgent needs of street urchins and impoverished single mothers. Stop-gap programs included free kindergartens, free dental care, job training and placement and temporary housing for homeless boys.

But Brace pictured a permanent solution to the problem – placing New York’s unwanted children in loving homes far from the urban cesspool that turned even Charles Dickens’ stomach. “In every American community,” he wrote, “especially in a western one, there are many spare places at the table of life.”

This optimistic belief was the basis for Brace’s “Emigration Plan.” In 1854 he put his radical theory into practice by sending a group of 46 children to Michigan. Inside a week, each and every one had a new home.

Encouraged by this success, the CAP concentrated on relocation. Over the next decade, an annual average of 384 orphaned and abandoned children were taken from the wretched environment of Manhattan and resettled in small towns throughout New England and the eastern Midwest.

After the Civil War, the yearly exodus exploded to a thousand due to the growing number of needy minors. Widows of slain soldiers entrusted their sons and daughters to the Children’s Aid Society, as did disillusioned immigrants who found the boulevards of the Big Apple were not paved with gold. In addition, a rising tide of runaways fleeing neglect and abuse came on their own to the CAP.

Although they usually went by rail, the little refugees and their grown escorts or “agents” rarely filled a passenger car much less an entire train. (A notable exception was a trainload of 300 Catholic youngsters transported to Louisiana in 1906 by the Sisters of Charity.) The typical group consisted of 30 to 40 children ranging in age from four to 14.

Posters and newspaper articles advertised the arrival of an “Orphan Train,” a slang term coined by the public and press, weeks in advance. A large crowd was always waiting at the station, and the curious followed prospective parents, normally prequalified by a local committee, to the “viewing.”

In the book “We Rode the Orphan Trains,” a woman who came to Texas in 1918 described what it was like to be put on display. “We were lined up on the stage and all I could see was wall-to-wall people. They surrounded us, made us turn around, lift our skirts to see if our legs were straight, and open our mouths to show our teeth. A very humiliating day.”

Placement was hardly an exact science, and more than a few children were exploited and mistreated by their surrogate parents. CAP agents came around once a year to check on their former wards and did not hesitate to rescue them from bad homes. Nevertheless, the CAP conceded in a 1910 report that the end of the line for at least 13 percent of Orphan Train riders was not a happy and healthy place.

Charles Loring Brace’s abolitionist bias against the former Confederacy kept the number of trains with southern destinations to a minimum. The Sisters of Charity had no such reservations, however, and may have brought as many children to Texas as the Children’s Aid Society.

But the Orphan Trains did come to the Lone Star State, including the final one in May 1929. The children that got off the train at Sulphur Springs on that sunny spring day were the last of an estimated 200,000 brought west in the most unusual migration in American history.

“Unforgettable Texans” brings to life the once famous people no one remembers today. Order your autographed copy for $24 by mailing a check to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.