Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Michigan was a relatively progressive state in 1853. It was Republican, strongly antislavery, and substantially populated by immigrants from western New York, who were perhaps somewhat more disposed than other midwesterners to take in poor children from New York City. All these factors might have played a role in the selection of Dowagiac as the testing ground for Brace’s reform experiment. But in all likelihood the village was chosen primarily because somebody there—the mayor, the doctor, the Presbyterian minister—knew Brace or someone else at the CAS. Especially during the early decades of the society, Brace tried to turn every meeting or social gathering to his advantage. Social reformers from all over the country—and the world—commonly dropped by the CAS offices to meet Brace and to see his operation firsthand. If one such visitor was a prominent citizen from Dowagiac, it is more than likely that Brace would have sounded him out about the possibility of sending a party of “emigrants” there, and if the visitor was well disposed, Brace would have asked him to organize a local committee to manage the distribution of the children.

  Such committees were usually organized several weeks in advance of the arrival of the orphan trains. They consisted of prominent local citizens—clergymen, merchants, newspaper editors, doctors, lawyers—who would arrange the site where the children would be distributed, publicize the event (newspaper editors were particularly desired as committee members because they could print flyers and run ads for free), find lodgings for the orphan train party, and consult with the CAS agent on the merits of the people applying to take children. It is not clear whether so elaborate a committee was established for this first orphan train. E. P. Smith, the CAS agent who accompanied the children, made no mention of a committee in his detailed report on the trip. He did say, however, that he had to negotiate sleeping accommodations at a local tavern himself. At the very least, the Reverend Mr. O. of the Presbyterian church had known about the arrival of the party and had publicized it in advance.

  The first orphan train company left New York by riverboat on the evening of September 28,1854. There were thirty-seven boys and girls in the group. Nine others who had been scheduled for the trip apparently arrived at the CAS offices too late to make the boat and were sent by train to join the company in Albany the following morning. In his report, Smith said that the children ranged from six to fifteen years in age, and he summed up the life histories of thirty-six of the children in a single word: “orphans.” But he went into the background of some of the ten vagrants in much greater detail:

  Two of these had slept in nearly all the station-houses in the city. One, a keen-eyed American boy, was born in Chicago—an orphan now, and abandoned in New York by an intemperate brother. Another, a little German Jew, who had been entirely friendless for four years, and had finally found his way in the Newsboys’ Lodging-house. Dick and Jack were brothers of Sara O——, whom we sent to Connecticut. Their father is intemperate; mother died at Bellevue Hospital three weeks since; and an older brother had just been sentenced to Sing Sing Prison. Their father, a very sensible man when sober, begged me to take the boys along, “for I am sure, sir, if left in New York, they will come to the same bad end as their brother.” We took them to a shoe shop. Little Jack made awkward work in trying on a pair. “He don’t know them, sir; there’s not been a cover to his feet for three winters.”19

  The single child given the most attention in the narrative was a twelve-year-old boy called “Liverpool,” after the city of his birth. He had been found in the Fourth Ward (encompassing most of Five Points and the desperately poor Cherry Street) only hours before the boat’s departure by a CAS visitor named Mr. Gerry. Apparently Liverpool had been a vagrant orphan before shipping to the United States as a cabin boy. Once he landed in New York, he supported himself by doing odd jobs on the docks and dressed in sailors’ ragged castoffs, most of which were much too large for him. When Gerry found him, he had so many garments wrapped and tied about his body that he looked like a “walking rag bundle.”

  Gerry seems to have had no compunction about spiriting this boy out of the city on this first, experimental orphan train without even bothering to check into his claims of orphanhood; nor did Liverpool voice any objection to his sudden change of situation. Gerry took him straight to the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where he was bathed and given a haircut, a new suit, and shoes, and then rushed him down to the dock to board the boat just before its departure.

  In those days the boats traveling the Hudson River between Manhattan and Albany were sidewheelers with twin stacks that spewed long plumes of acrid black smoke. The children’s boat was called the Isaac Newton—after the shipping company’s largest stockholder, not the famous mathematician. The CAS had bought them “emigrant” or “steerage” tickets, the cheapest available, and the children had to sleep on rough, stinking, vermin-ridden matting on the ship’s lowest deck. They were saved from this fate at the last instant by the boat’s captain, who had heard them singing on the gangway and invited them to his salon. After listening to several of their sad stories, the captain let them spend the night in the mostly vacant berths of the boat’s cabin.

  The children also attracted serious interest from a couple of the riverboat’s passengers. Smith gave one of the little boys to a woman from Rochester who thought her sister would like to take him in. And Mr. B., a merchant from Illinois, took Liverpool to work in his store. Smith made no independent inquiries into the background of either passenger. He simply trusted his first impression. “I afterwards met Mr. B. in Buffalo,” Smith reported, “and he said that he would not part with the boy for any consideration; and I thought that to take such a boy from such a condition, and put him into such hands, was worth the whole trip.”

  The riverboat arrived in Albany at six in the morning, and the “emigrant train” to the West did not leave until noon. Smith put the stopover to good use, meeting up with the nine tardy children who had been sent up from New York by rail and adding a new boy to the expedition with all the casualness with which he had dispensed with the two others.

  The new boy’s name was John, but he went by the street moniker of “Smack,” and his “twisted, tangled hair, matted for years,” his “badger” coat, and pants so overlarge they fluttered in the breeze marked him as a vagrant or “snoozer.” As Smith told the story, his decision to take the boy along was a matter of reason losing out to compassion—and to the urgings of the other children. “Here’s a boy what wants to go to Michigan, sir,” Smith was told by a group of his charges. “Can’t you take him with us?”

  “But, do you know him?” Smith responded. “Can you recommend him as a suitable boy to belong to our company?”

  The children knew nothing about him, not even his name. “Only he’s as hard-up as any of us,” they said. “He’s no father or mother, and nobody to live with, and he sleeps out o’ nights.” The boy also pleaded for himself, saying he wanted to be a farmer and live in the country.

  Smith finally relented after a moment of meditation: “Our number is full—purse scant—it may be difficult to find him a home. But there is no resisting the appeal of the boys, and the importunate face of the young vagrant. Perhaps he will do well; at any rate, we must try him. If left to float here a few months longer, his end is certain.”

  After a face scrub and haircut, Smack was allowed into the company and formally interviewed. Smith’s notes on the interview reproduce exactly the standard entry for orphan train riders in the CAS “Record Books,” the main filing system used during the society’s first three decades: “John———, American—Protestant—13 years—Orphan— Parents died in R—, Maine—A ‘snoozer’ for four years—Most of the time in New York, with an occasional visit to Albany and Troy,’when times go hard’—Intelligent—Black, sharp eye—Hopeful.”20

  Smith’s description of the trip from Albany to Dowagiac is so vivid, and tells so much about the conditions endured by the children and all emigrants of the era, that I am quoting it in its entirety. This passage is also striking wh
en considered as propaganda, in part because Smith and Brace (Brace selected and edited the journal entry for publication) seem utterly unashamed of the hardships the children suffered—an attitude that tells us something about normal nineteenth-century travel conditions and, perhaps, about common notions of what treatment poor children deserved. But it also illustrates clearly Smith’s and Brace’s distinct vision of such children. Whereas many commentators of the era might have cited the children’s misbehavior as a sign of their innate criminality, Smith celebrated it as evidence of their vitality and even innocence:

  At the depot we worked our way through the Babel of at least one thousand Germans, Irish, Italians, and Norwegians, with whom nothing goes right; every one insists that he is in the wrong car—that his baggage has received the wrong mark—that Chicago is in this direction, and the cars are on the wrong track; in short, they are agreed upon nothing except in the opinion that this is a “bad counthry, and it’s good luck to the soul who sees the end on’t.” The conductor, a red-faced, middle-aged man, promises to give us a separate car; but, while he whispers and negotiates with two Dutch21 girls, who are traveling without a protector, the motley mass rush into the cars, and we are finally pushed into one already full—some standing, a part sitting in laps, and some on the floor under the benches—crowded to suffocation, in a freight-car without windows—rough benches for seats, and no back—no ventilation except through the sliding doors, where the little chaps are in constant danger of falling through. There were scenes that afternoon and night which it would not do to reveal. Irishmen passed around bad whisky and sang bawdy songs; Dutch men and women smoked and sang, and grunted and cursed; babies squalled and nursed, and left no baby duties undone.

  Night came on, and we were told that “passengers furnish their own lights!” For this we were unprepared, and so we tried to endure the darkness, which never before seemed half so thick as in that stifled car, though it was relieved here and there for a few minutes by a lighted pipe. One Dutchman in the corner kept up a constant fire; and when we told him we were choking with smoke, he only answered with a complacent grunt and a fresh supply of the weed. The fellow seemed to puff when he was fairly asleep, and the curls were lifting beautifully above the bowl, when smash against the car went the pipe in a dozen pieces! No one knew the cause, except, perhaps, the boy behind me, who had begged an apple a few minutes before.

  At Utica we dropped our fellow-passengers from Germany, and, thus partially relieved, spent the rest of the night in tolerable comfort.

  In the morning, we were in the vicinity of Rochester, and you can hardly imagine the delight of the children as they looked, many of them for the first time, upon country scenery. Each one must see everything we passed, find its name, and make his own comments. “What’s that, mister?” “A corn-field.” “Oh, yes; them’s what makes buckwheaters.” “Look at them cows (oxen plowing); my mother used to milk cows.” As we whirled through orchards loaded with large, red apples, their enthusiasm rose to the highest pitch. It was difficult to keep them within doors. Arms stretched out, hats swinging, eyes swimming, mouths watering, and all screaming—“Oh! oh! just look at ‘em! Mister, be they any sich in Michigan? Then I’m for that place—three cheers for Michigan/” We had been riding in comparative quiet for nearly an hour, when all at once the greatest excitement broke out. We were passing a corn-field spread over with ripe yellow pumpkins. “Oh! yonder! look! Just look at ‘em!” and in an instant the same exclamation was yelled from forty-seven mouths. “Jist look at ‘em! What a heap of mushmillons!” “Mister, do they make mushmillons in Michigan?” “Ah, fellers, ain’t that the country tho’—won’t we have nice things to eat?” “Yes, won’t we sell some, too?” “Hip! hip! boys; three cheers for Michigan.!”

  At Buffalo we received great kindness from Mr. Harrison, the freight-agent and this was by no means his first service to the Children’s Aid Society. Several boys and girls whom we have sent West have received the kindest attention at his hands. I am sure Mr. H.’s fireside must be a happy spot. Also Mr. Noble, agent for the Mich. C.R.R., gave me a letter of introduction, which was of great service on the way.

  We were in Buffalo nine hours, and the boys had the liberty of the town, but were all on board the boat in season. We went down to our place, the steerage cabin, and no one but an emigrant on a lake-boat can understand the night we spent. The berths are covered with a coarse mattress, used by a thousand different passengers, and never changed till they are filled with stench and vermin. The emigrants spend the night in washing, smoking, drinking, singing, sleep, and licentiousness. It was the last night in the freight-car repeated, with the addition of a touch of sea-sickness, and of the stamping, neighing, and bleating of a hundred horses and sheep over our heads, and the effluvia of their filth pouring through the open gangway. But we survived the night; how had better not be detailed. In the morning we got outside upon the boxes, and enjoyed the beautiful day. The boys were in good spirit, sung songs, told New York yarns, and made friends generally among the passengers. Occasionally, some one more knowing than wise would attempt to poke fun at them, whereupon the boy would ‘pitch in,’ and open such a sluice of Bowery slang as made Mr. Would-be-funny beat a retreat in double-quick time. No one attempted that game twice. During the day the clerk discovered that three baskets of peaches were missing, all except the baskets. None of the boys had been detected with the fruit, but I afterwards found they had eaten it.

  Landed in Detroit at ten o’clock, Saturday night, and took a first- class passenger car on the Mich. C.R.R., and reached D———c, a “smart little town,” in S.W. Michigan, three o’clock Sunday morning.

  One element suppressed in all CAS writing is the children’s suffering at being separated from their families, friends, and homes and sent hundreds of miles away to live with total strangers. Not all of the children suffered great fear or grief, of course. Some of the older ones were so used to being on their own, or had suffered such mistreatment, that they found nothing daunting in the prospect of leaving the city and living with a farm family. Younger children, especially those who had been orphaned in infancy, often had not made strong ties to anyone and so did not feel much loss; nor had they any clear idea of what it might mean to be part of a family. Other children reacted to the ordeal of transport and placement simply by shutting down emotionally, while still others became hyperactive—perhaps some of the very children whose vitality Smith celebrated. But common sense and the testimony of surviving orphan train riders make clear that there was a lot of weeping and a lot of fear at every stage of the orphan train process—and none of it was ever referred to in any CAS account.

  Sometimes Brace or other CAS correspondents referred to parents weeping as they gave up their children, but the children themselves were always presented as happy, or at the very least as stalwart and resolved. The closest E. P. Smith came to showing the suffering of the children in his care was when he told about the grief of a seven-year-old boy named Peter at the disappearance of his six-year-old brother.

  Having arrived at Dowagiac at three in the morning, there was nothing for Smith or his group of children to do other than try to catch a little sleep right on the railroad platform. The children were so excited to at last be in Michigan, however, that as soon as the sun rose they ran off in all directions to explore the town. Within a very short while, they were all back at the station, hungry for breakfast—all except Peter’s little brother George. Smith apparently never noticed the little boy’s absence, and if Peter noticed, he never brought it to his caretaker’s attention.

  Smith led the children to the American House (the tavern where he had negotiated their lodging and board) for breakfast, and then took them to the Presbyterian church, where they would be presented to the citizens of Dowagiac for the first time. The minister was late, so the children entertained the congregation by singing hymns, including “Come Ye Sinners Poor and Needy.” When at last the Reverend Mr. O. arrived, Smith made his pitch to the co
ngregation about the children and announced that he would himself deliver a sermon in the afternoon. It was only as the group was returning to the tavern for lunch that Smith noticed, or was informed, that Peter’s little brother was missing.

  George had last been seen near daybreak, heading out of town across a bridge. Smith and the children dove into the creek beneath the bridge, looking for the little boy’s body, and searched the surrounding woods, all to no avail. That night when the children came in for supper, there was, according to Smith,

  a shade of sadness on their faces, and they spoke in softer tones of the lost playmate. But the saddest was George’s brother, one year older. They were two orphans—all alone in the world. Peter stood up at the table, but when he saw his brother’s place at his side vacant, he burst out in uncontrollable sobbing. After supper he seemed to forget his loss, till he lay down on the floor at night, and there was the vacant spot again, and his little heart flowed over with grief. Just so again when he awoke in the morning, and at breakfast and dinner.

  Smith implied great sympathy for Peter with this description, but apparently he did not feel enough sympathy to do anything more to help find George. The “morning” referred to was Monday, the day the distribution of the children had been set to begin, and Smith was not about to let the loss of a six-year-old orphan interfere with the proceedings. And by his account, the children were as resigned to George’s disappearance as he was: “Monday morning the boys held themselves in readiness to receive applications from the farmers. They would watch at all directions, scanning closely every wagon that came in sight, and deciding from the appearance of the driver and the horses, more often from the latter, whether they ‘would go in for that farmer.’”22