The Orphan Train Rider In My Family Tree

     When I first heard about the Orphan Trains when I was a young teenager, I was fascinated but never thought I had any personal connection. But oh - the surprises we find doing research!

     It’s impossible to imagine now, but from at least the 1850s to the early twentieth century, thousands of homeless and poor children lived on the streets - an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 at a time in New York City alone. These were children on their own, children as young as six, working in a variety of ways, selling newspapers, matches and apples, shining shoes, sweeping the streets, working as errand and delivery boys - all for a pittance to earn enough to buy a meal from a tavern or eaterie. They slept where they could find shelter of sorts - in hay barges, barrels, old sheds, stairwells or a heated grate. Many had living parents; often a widowed mother. Some were sent out to earn money by their impoverished and often alcoholic parents, but plenty were orphans or were abandoned. Another reason they were “turned out” to work was it was nearly impossible for most single women to support a family alone. Low-income men without extended family to help often placed their children in asylums when the mother died - or sent them out to work. New York City was not alone in having homeless children, but it had, by far, the most.

     Not surprisingly, there was great concern about these children. But it wasn’t for reasons one would expect. Rather than a deep concern for the well-being of the children, the focus was on concern for society. These “street rats,” as the police called them, would grow up to be a dangerous criminal element if something wasn’t done. A missionary Congregationalist minister, Charles Loring Brace, feared that Catholic immigrant populations, left unchecked, would someday revolt against the Protestant establishment. The “Dangerous classes,” he warned, consisted mainly of the children of Irish and German immigrants, overwhelmingly Catholic. He believed, as an Adoption History Project article stated, that “malleable and innocent children, if removed early enough from depraved parents, could escape the inferior culture inherent in their homes and communities and become upstanding citizens.” In fact, he thought the only way to save them was to get them away from their families and neighborhoods.

     Charles Loring Brace formed the Children’s Aid Society in 1853. He had an idealized view of rural life that was quite common at the time. City life was corrupting; farm life was wholesome.  In 1854, he began sending children west to find homes and serve as farm labor. Agents with the Children’s Aid Society would round up a group of children, clean them up, put them in a suit of new clothes, and accompany them on trains to the Midwest (though eventually to all 48 states). Their arrival was advertised in the newspapers, with local officials helping to coordinate. 

     There were some special characteristics about the program. The goal was that the children found a true home, a family; that they would be adopted and loved. They were not sent as indentured servants, an earlier solution to orphaned children, or the children of single mothers who could not support them. If they were unhappy, they could be moved to a new home. The Society kept in touch with the children through letters. An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 children rode the Orphan Trains over a 75-year period.

     

Ad in the Osage City Free Press, (Osage, Kansas), 11 Feb 1886

     Many children found happy homes; others did not. Some returned to New York and were reunited with their families. Others were babies when they rode the trains, and had no idea what their family background was. Typically, they went to the town’s opera house (theater/auditorium) or town hall, where the children were paraded on stage and townsfolk picked whom they wanted.

Frank Colwell

     On 11 Nov 1894, an item ran in the Independence Daily Reporter: “Children Find Homes.” B.W. Tice and Miss Roberts of the Children’s Aid Society arrived in Montgomery County, Kansas with 22 orphans, ranging in age from 14 months to 15 years. They were described as a “bright and attractive lot of children.” 

    They got off the train in Cherryvale, where they went to the Caldwell House, a hotel, for breakfast. City Hall was selected as their “place of distribution,” but “a number of children were gobbled up before they got away from the hotel.” A committee that included the mayor and a minister assisted in the “distribution.” There were more people at City Hall than there were children. Yet by the end of the day, the article noted, little Louis Cohen and Silas Mattoni, both 7, had not been claimed.

     Frank Colwell, 14, was chosen by M.C. Barbour – my great-great-grandfather, Myron Cassius Barbour. Fourteen-year old boys, safe to say, were likely chosen for farm labor and not out of an altruistic desire for more children. Myron had a farm on Sandy Ridge outside of Coffeyville. He had a strained relationship with his only child, Clyde, who left home at age 14 in 1889 to work on a cattle ranch in the I.T. - Indian Territory - in other words, Oklahoma. Frank was enumerated with Myron and Agnes Barbour on the 1895 Kansas state census. In 1897 there was an unclaimed letter for Frank in the Coffeyville Post Office. He was gone. 

     In 1899, Agnes, a quiet, churchgoing woman, took the extreme step of divorcing Myron. There was tremendous stigma to divorce. She went to live with her son Clyde, who married in 1898 and had a baby son. Myron married two more times and in both cases, his wives filed for divorce, with embarrassing comments about him being “quarrelsome” and difficult in the newspaper. He was divorced a total of four times as he had a previous marriage before Agnes. I doubt their home was a happy placement for Frank. 

     And what happened to Frank? A Frank Colwell was living with his brother James and family in Elsmore, Kansas in 1900. This Frank Colwell - who I suspect is the Orphan Train rider - lived till 1961 and farmed in Elsmore. He remained a bachelor all his life. I pray that he found happiness, and considered his life a good life. 

  Sources:

     Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York - Twenty Year’s Work Among Them, New York: Wyncoop & Hallenbeck, 1872.

     “Charles Loring Brace,” The Adoption History Project, Department of History, University of Oregon, https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/people/brace.html

     “The Orphan Train Movement: Catholics vs. Protestants,” Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickenson StateUniversity, 2019, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/The%20Orphan%20Train%20Movement:%20Catholics%20vs.%20Protestants

Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2022