Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story

by Marilyn June Coffey

  B. Eagerman

  Did you know the orphan train movement of 1854–1929 displaced more children than any other attempt in world history? That’s true, even though no one knows for sure how many children rode those trains to new homes.

  Early figures indicate that only 100,000 children went, even though one orphanage (the Children’s Aid Society) reported it alone sent 105,000. The middle-of-the road estimate—or guess—is about 200,000 children, maybe 250,000. But recent data show sthat 400,000 to 500,000 children traveled from the East Coast to every state in the Union in what some call the “Greatest American Migration.”

  No matter which figure, if any, is correct, the orphan train movement apparently ranks as the world’s largest relocation of children. It certainly lords it over two other notable movements: the Native American boarding school movement and the Children’s Crusade.

  In 1870, sixteen years after the Rev. Charles Loring Brace gave birth to the orphan train movement, Christian missionaries began to remove Native American children from their reservations and place them in boarding schools. Fifty-eight years later, in 1928, just a year before the orphan trains stopped running, the missionary-teachers closed down the schools. During this time, they removed some 100,000 Native American children from their homes and deposited them into 500 schools. There the teachers forced them to abandon their native identity in many ways, such as cutting their hair, dressing in European-American style, and forcing them to speak only English.

  A Kansas orphan train, c. 1900, probably similar to the train Teresa rode in 1910. (Photo courtesy of Kansas State Historical Society)

  Some 700 years earlier, in 1212, troops of 30,000 French and 50,000 German children supposedly marched to the Mediterranean to help adult Christians wrest the Holy Land from Muslims in what has been called the Children’s Crusade.

  Both the Children’s Crusade and the Native American boarding school movement relocated a substantial number of children, but if recent orphan train figures are accurate, the orphan train displaced nearly three times as many children as the other two movements combined. Not for nothing is the orphan train movement called the “Greatest American Migration.”

  •

  This gigantic orphan train effort caught three-year-old Teresa (Jessie Feit) Martin, my subject in Mail-Order Kid. It whisked her from the safety of her New York orphanage, where the worst thing the nuns did was wash her hair, to Kansas. There she entered a small and strange Volga German world whose inhabitants spoke a language she had never heard. In this odd world, she encountered whippings and sexual abuse. She was like a foot soldier thrust pell-mell into a battle he doesn’t understand.

  To think that tens of thousands of children, like Teresa, rode into harmful families boggles my mind. Of course, not all foster parents abused orphan train riders. Many provided adequate homes and some excellent ones.

  So if these children’s foster homes differ, why should we examine the life of only one of thousands of riders? The orphan train phenomenon was so vast that no individual rider’s childhood story can be universally true. Yet by examining the endeavor through the awareness of one individual, such as Teresa, we can hold up a mirror to the movement as a whole.

  Some of our best wartime writers knew this. Stephen Crane, for instance, in his The Red Badge of Courage writes about the American Civil War through the eyes of a new recruit under fire. Erich Remarque’s highly popular All Quiet on the Western Front depicts World War I from the perspective of an infantryman himself.

  Reading in Mail-Order Kid about Teresa Martin’s experience as an orphan train rider lets us understand not just Teresa’s life but also the deep impact that these arbitrary relocations had on thousands of children.

  •

  Being an orphan, like Teresa Martin, leaves permanent scars, psychologists believe. The original families of orphans, by definition, have vanished, but children who rode the train to a new world lost an entire culture as well. These deprivations left their marks: physical, intellectual, and emotional wounds. Adoption alone, psychologists say, often results in post-traumatic stress disorder.

  The orphan’s experience of displacement is like exhaustion from a prolonged trauma, the sort of thing Rebecca West describes in The Return of the Soldier, a World War I novel. Her book depicts a shell-shocked British soldier as he tries to re-integrate into British society—a necessity familiar to orphan train riders who entered new communities. Some, like Teresa Martin, had to learn a second language.

  We know, from riders themselves, that “prolonged trauma” was common. Often men or women shed tears when they described their childhood lives with foster parents. What happened to them varied. How they responded to it also differed, depending in part on their personalities.

  Whether riders perceived a foster home as good or bad seems to pivot on whether or not the child felt loved. Some children did. Irma Schnieders was “petted and pampered.” Jean L. Sexton received a bike; William Macy, a young mare; and Ann, more bonnets than she could wear. (Last names of some of the orphans are not available.)

  Willie Dunnaway considered his new family a blessing, and Rosa Pfeifer remembers her foster parents as wonderful. Their example caused Rosa to make up her mind “that if I couldn’t have any children of my own, I’d adopt some.”

  Some riders valued most of the things they learned. Mary Tenopir, for instance, learned to set a pretty table, dance to a fiddle, and play cards. Mary Belle Foose received a college education, unusual for a young woman then. John Wellington Danielson’s adoptive parents supported him through college with a B.A. and an M.A. degree.

  Margaret Weber, who considers herself “one of the lucky ones,” really sums up the essence of a good foster home when she says, “I was loved.”

  By contrast, Alan Bankston said of the foster home where he lived with his twin brother, “They gave us everything we needed but love.” Teresa Martin’s home was like that, without love. And so, to a large extent, was the Volga German community where fate had deposited her.

  Bad foster homes, unfortunately, were common. In those households where an adult mistreated a child, some children ran away, but others, like Teresa, toughed it out. Sometimes agents such as “Grandpa” McFeeley removed a child and arranged an alternate placement.

  Adults in the orphan train era commonly punished children by thrashing them, but in the case of some orphan train riders, those whippings went beyond the pale. Katie’s foster parents lashed her until she was black and blue. McFeeley, a beloved agent, once spotted scabs on a young boy’s wrists and made him, under protest, remove his shirt. Scars of previous beatings striped the boy’s back.

  Harry “Shorty” Morris’s foster parent worked the boy over so hard his screams carried to a nearby farm. When the farmer protested, the foster father stopped blistering Shorty outdoors where the neighbors could hear. Instead, he walloped Shorty indoors.

  Harold Williams was “scared to death” of his foster mother, “an old lady who was a tyrant.” She even flogged him when he fell sick, on the theory that sickness means you have done something bad.

  In the worse case I encountered, a young boy who was herding cattle went missing. Local Harlan County, Nebraska, officials arrested the foster father, who was known to be mean to the boy. A trial proved nothing. One night, the foster father and his family vanished. After that, local inhabitants found the boy’s body buried in a field.

  Sometimes foster homes were bad just because of the indignities. Margaret Driscoll had to sleep on the couch and could not use the indoor toilet. Mary Goth’s foster parents kept her out of school after the third grade to cook and keep house. Her foster mother wanted one of her sons to impregnate Mary so she would stay home and work.

  Many children were overworked. Claretta Brown Miller, not yet eight years old, had to wait on a family of nine. Malinda, only six, had to wash dishes, even though she was so short she had to stand on a chair and a box to reach them. Paul Forch had to scrub wooden floors daily with lye; he scrubbe
d until his hands bled. Larry Davis had to split a pile of wood, even though he was ill with pneumonia.

  Small wonder, then, to hear that Dorothy Davidson bit her foster mother or that Viola Du Frane learned, at four, that it did no good to cry.

  However, even in the best of homes, loneliness must have been common. Orphan Toni Weiler said her loneliness never entirely dissipated, not even as an adult. Her loving family might surround her, but in an instant, this loneliness would drop, and she would remember that she didn’t really know who she was or where she came from. Not knowing who you are implies a question of familial identity; not knowing where you come from signals a loss from cultural displacement. Teresa Martin, like many orphan train riders, experienced both.

  •

  The orphanage that brought Teresa from New York to Kansas in 1910 was the New York Foundling Hospital. It had sent children out West since shortly after the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul started the Foundling in 1869.

  The Foundling Hospital’s specialty was caring for abandoned babies, a dreadful problem in New York City where infant desertion, and even infanticide, had become epidemic. Mothers tossed unwanted babies in the garbage, on the street, or in the Hudson River. More caring mothers deposited infants where someone might find them—on the doorstep of a rich family, in a tenement hallway, or at a convent’s entrance.

  At the Foundling, the nuns kept a bassinet in the vestibule where mothers could deposit their infants incognito. Teresa’s mother probably did not use the bassinet. I suspect she gave Teresa, only a few days old, directly to the nuns, for she paid for her daughter’s care for a while.

  For nearly sixty years, the Foundling relocated babies and toddlers on its Baby Trains, to the tune of about 600 children a year, but it was only second in placing children. The primary mover was the Children’s Aid Society, the group that initiated the orphan train movement. For every baby or toddler the Foundling sent, the CAS relocated three or four children, mostly young boys, for an average of some 2,000 children a year.

  Other asylums also delivered children to new homes. These included Five Points Mission, New York Juvenile Asylum, New England Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, Illinois Children’s Home Society, San Francisco’s Boys and Girls Aid Society, and others of the hundreds of orphan asylums in the United States.

  •

  Ironically, the man who founded this vast orphan train operation, Methodist minister Charles Loring Brace, did not intend it. He just wanted to help the 10,000 to 30,000 or so children living on the streets of New York City in 1853. He couldn’t stand to see scruffy looking boys, barefoot and dressed in rags, sleeping on steps, in boxes, under stairways, or in cellars. Their pinched faces and hard eyes made them resemble old men. “Street rats,” Brace called them. Someone had to help them, he believed, or they would rise up and “reduce our city to ashes.”

  Most of these boys had ridden into New York on a tidal wave of European emigrants fleeing famine, natural disasters, persecution, or revolutions. Few of these newcomers spoke English. Expecting to be welcomed into a city so rich that it paved its streets with gold, they found only poor paying jobs and a housing shortage. Half of New York’s population of 500,000 lived in 18,000 tenements. Alcohol often relieved deep disappointment and justified leaving children to fend for themselves on the streets.

  After Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society, he experimented with several ways to help these destitute children. He offered lodging, Sunday sermons, and industrial schools, but he believed that if children stayed in the city, their futures would be bleak. Therefore, he sent hundreds of boys to farm families in Rhode Island, Maine, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

  New York City street children photographed by Jacob Riis.

  After these placements seemed successful, he sent forty-seven children “out West” to Dowagiac, Michigan, in 1854. Historians say that this act marked the dawn of the orphan train movement, a phenomenon that would transform Teresa Martin’s life.

  Brace’s Protestant group, the CAS, soon made Catholic enemies. They hated the way Brace “snatched” children off the streets and sent them out of the city. They accused him of putting Catholic children into Protestant homes in order to convert them.

  Because of this jealousy, the New York Foundling Hospital sent babies and toddlers out of the city, too. The Foundling baptized Jewish infants, like Teresa, and Protestant babies, readying them for placement in Catholic homes.

  When it sent Teresa Martin from New York to Kansas, the Foundling had been relocating children for forty years. The orphan train campaign was fifty-six years old when Teresa Martin boarded the train.

  •

  Even though both the CAS and the Foundling relocated children, their methods differed. Teresa Martin was fortunate that the Foundling, not the CAS, sent her.

  The CAS found families for their children, mostly young boys, by sending agents to likely communities and advertising in the newspaper. Any person who wanted a child applied to a committee of townspeople.

  Then agents would bring out a group of children from New York, stop in selected towns, and display the youngsters on a stage or in a big room. If no room was available, agents would line children along the railroad tracks, an experience that orphan George Beaton described as “walking the plank.”

  People approved by the committee would inspect the children, often pinching muscles or examining teeth. Then they made their selections, sometimes fighting over particular children.

  Unlike the CAS, the Foundling arranged homes for children in advance. It relied on local priests to help find good country homes for their needy Catholic babies. In New York, the nuns matched children to their new homes, pinning a numbered tag on the child and sending the same number to the chosen family. Teresa, for instance, was number four.

  Because nuns chose homes in advance, the Foundling did not line up children alongside a track, and their children did not have to undergo the indignity of being pinched.

  •

  By the time Teresa rode from New York City to Hays, Kansas, in 1910, the orphan train movement had peaked. The Foundling would stop its program in 1927, the CAS in 1929.

  Why did this placement of children end?

  Well, the world “out West” was changing. States passed laws forbidding the transportation of children across state boundaries, implying, “keep your Eastern refuse out of our world.” They also passed laws prohibiting child labor or requiring farmers to pay for it. Other laws required attendance at school for six or eight months of the year, which reduced a child’s usefulness as a worker. These laws slowed down placement of older boys.

  About the same time, trained social workers replaced orphanage volunteers. They argued that children, if possible, should stay with their families. Transporting children great distances and leaving them seemed irresponsible. Indeed, the entire orphan train system seemed onerous. Some called it slavery.

  •

  Mail-Order Kid reveals the orphan train movement through a detailed examination of one rider’s history. The reader of this biography will not only experience Teresa Martin’s being but, through it, will understand the orphan train’s power to transform lives, for good or ill.

  Choosing Teresa Martin as the subject of this biography proved fortunate. Although the Foundling placed her in an abusive home, she was not without strengths; she was a spunky, bright, imaginative girl. She didn’t just keel over from the abuse. She fought it. She fought it—because she was an optimist.

  This is a story about a courageous woman who had the strength, finally, to face her origins. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to tell Teresa’s remarkable story. It’s a gripping tale and one I relish recounting.

  Here is a guide as you read the book.

  Part I: Bitter and Battered shows what happened to Teresa because the Foundling Hospital placed her on an orphan train. We see the Foundling nuns taking three-year-old Teresa from New York City in 1910 to meet her foster parents in El
lis County, Kansas. Over the years, the Foundling placed more than a hundred children in that county. Her new parents, the Biekers, lived in Schoenchen, a German-speaking village.

  The four chapters in this part not only delineate the abuse Teresa experienced at the hands of the Biekers and the local schoolchildren, but also show the helpfulness of a priest who taught her to speak German and of nuns who were encouraging teachers. This part ends in 1920 just before the sheriff arrives to remove a bloody Teresa from her Bieker home.

  Part II: Among the Lowest of the Low depicts Teresa’s life after the sheriff removed her. These five chapters cover a wide time span, from 1920 when she was fourteen to 1962 at age fifty-six.

  Teresa had good reason to consider herself “among the lowest of the low” when she worked as an Orphan Annie. She escaped that fate by marrying a handicapped man and bearing him two children. However, the desire to be educated, planted by the Schoenchen nuns, provided her with ways to earn her high school diploma and then gain a college education.

  By the end of this part, Teresa was earning a good salary as a medical librarian in Denver. However, her success did not heal her trauma at being an orphan train rider, a history she concealed. Like orphan Toni Weiler, Teresa didn’t really know who she was or where she came from, and that brought her down.

  Part III: Agents of Change shows what happened to Teresa after she decided to stop concealing the fact that she was a “mail-order kid.” The six chapters in this part cover the time from 1962 in Denver to her death in Hays, Kansas, in 2001. By then, she was ninety-five and had become a strong voice in the orphan train movement, telling her story to journalists and to public groups. In 1999, the national Orphan Train Heritage Society of America gave her its Sister Irene Award for her role in preserving orphan train history.