Orphan Train Children , Almost Like Slaves?

Discussion in 'History & Geography' started by Yvonne Smith, Feb 4, 2020.

  1. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    This is an amazing piece of history that I had no idea even existed !
    It started in the 1830’s in New York City, because there were a lot of children homeless on the streets, and no place for them to go.
    The Children’s Aid Society began as a kind of boarding school for orphans and homeless children, but soon they could not handle the number of children coming through, so they devised the idea of shipping them out to the Midwest to be adopted by farm families, who needed more workers on their farms.

    Unfortunately, there were no background checks , or checks of any kind done on the prospective adoptive parents, and the children were paraded around on a stage while people looked them over just like they would have done at a slave market.
    Most of the children that were sent on the orphan trains were white children, and were of all ages, From babies through teenagers.

    They were supposed to be treated like a family member, but often, they just became cheap labor , with no way of escaping to something better.
    For almost 100 years of our American history, these children were sent out alone by trains, until our mission and orphanages changed their strategy of dealing with homeless children.

    https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/05/orphan-train-movement/

     
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  2. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I've watched a couple of documentaries about that. Some of them found good homes, but many were essentially slaves on the farm. Adoptions were like that in a lot of places, too. Like in slave auctions, the kids would be lined up and the potential parents would pick out what they wanted.

    Truth be told, while we put some nice ribbons on it today, the foster parent and adoption system we have today isn't as much better as we'd like to think it is. A lot of money goes into the system but the actual welfare of the children is pretty low on the list of priorities. The main difference between then and now is the public face that we put on it.
     
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  3. Patsy Faye

    Patsy Faye Supreme Member
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    This is why I try not to complain about 'my' lot in life
    So very sad
     
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  4. Tom Galty

    Tom Galty Veteran Member
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  5. Holly Saunders

    Holly Saunders Supreme Member
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    My siblings and I were almost sent to Australia in the 60's when we were in the Children's home. It was only at the last minute the powers that be realised we were foster children and not adoptees... and were expected to retrun to our parents, which we eventually did...
     
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  6. Patsy Faye

    Patsy Faye Supreme Member
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    Yep, wish people would consider others more
     
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  7. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I became a foster parent in Orange and Los Angeles counties as a step along the way to adopting my son, who I was not related to at the time. Once I became a foster parent, and even after I had adopted him, I was encouraged to continue as a foster parent. I spoke about that somewhere else in the forum a while ago so I won't go through that here, but someone could earn a pretty good living as a foster parent once they learned how to game the system, and there was almost nothing in the way of supervision. Oh, it was tough to become licensed as a foster parent, particularly because I was a single male, but once I was licensed, there wasn't really any supervision. There was a requirement that a caseworker would make an "unannounced" home visit once a month, or once every couple of months, I forget the schedule now, but these visits were never actually unannounced. The caseworker didn't want to spend time driving to a foster home only to find that no one was home, so they would always call in advance. During this time, I got to know several other foster parents and some of them were truly caring people who provided good homes to children who were in need of them, others were not. They would even discuss foster parenting as a business. I don't think that many of these homes approached the conditions that some of these children on the orphan trains faced, but it isn't necessarily a wonderful life for the children.
     
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  8. Tom Galty

    Tom Galty Veteran Member
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    Pleased for you.

    Do wonder how many more the powers that be did not realise.
     
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  9. Bess Barber

    Bess Barber Veteran Member
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    I agree with @Ken Anderson . There were probably some beautiful stories, mixed in with a whole lot of heartbreaking ones.
    I guess it is much the same today. It is such a toss up as to what kind of foster parents they will get. The again, it is a
    toss up as to the kind of parents you are born to as well.
     
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  10. Patsy Faye

    Patsy Faye Supreme Member
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    Fostering is a wonderful thing to do, I came to know two loving parents so very good for me, pity it only lasted
    2 years. But - for other children I cry on a daily basis, can't bear to hear - have to switch off
    Count those blessings and forget the past
     
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  11. Patsy Faye

    Patsy Faye Supreme Member
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    Meant to add @Tom Galty
     
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  12. Nancy Hart

    Nancy Hart Supreme Member
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    Orphan Train rider Stanley Cornell recounts the story of he and his brother’s experiences living in an orphanage and their eventual trip on an Orphan Train in the early 1900's.

     
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  13. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    That's a sad story with a wonderful ending. @Nancy Hart . Thanks for sharing it.
     
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  14. Lon Tanner

    Lon Tanner Supreme Member
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  15. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    One of the most unusual buildings from the 1800’s has to be the gigantic asylums. In areas where people were mostly farmers, and populations under 10,000; there were these magnificent buildings, not just here in America, but there are pictures from Mexico, Europe, and many other places.
    Some of these huge buildings were used as insane asylums, and it makes you wonder who was being put there, and why suddenly there were so many insane people that they needed such large housing facilities.
    Children from these people put into the asylums were also sent to orphanages, and maybe were on some of the orphan trains. We still have history of pioneers crossing the country in covered wagons, so why would they be building those immense building , if no one lived there ? It is pretty apparent to me that they were indeed left over from the earlier civilizations here, and we just found and repurposed them.

    I really like this “My Lunch Break” guy, because he has a lot of great information and pictures of the old structures and their history. This episode is about the asylums and the orphan trains, and the people that came here (mainly from Germany) in the 1800’s to set the orphanages up and keep them running to repopulate America.

     
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