When… or if… the “zero tolerance” border enforcement situation is resolved, there will inevitably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of children unable to reconnect with their parents. What to do? If we look back to the previous century, we’ll see there is a simple solution: put the kids on trains and ship them off to the heartland to work on farms.
In the mid-1800s, slums in New York and other eastern cities were bursting with immigrants who had come to the U.S. seeking relief from poor harvests, famines, political unrest and revolutions in their homelands. Advertising by railroad and steamship companies extolled America as “Land of the second chance” and where “free land” was available. The reality for most was quite different. Packed into slums where lack of sanitation resulted in rampant disease and working at low-wage jobs where safety was not a consideration during an era of no worker protection, neither against injury or death, nor resultant financial loss. The streets of New York became infested with 30,000 permanently separated children.
In 1853, a young minister named Charles Loring Brace gathered a group of businessmen to found the Children’s Aid Society. The Society began the “free-home-placing-out” of children in 1854. When the program ended in 1929, about 250,000 unaccompanied children had been dispersed around the country.
“Placing out” meant rounding up children – from infants to teenagers, street urchins and children given up by parents who could not afford them – cleaning them up, giving each a bible, and putting them, in groups of ten to forty, on trains headed to small towns, usually in farming country. The children traveled knowing they would never again see their parents nor usually, siblings.
Advance advertising via newspaper and flyers in the destination town announced the coming of the orphan children. Upon arrival at the station, the children would be lined up for inspection. Prospective parents would make their choices. Adoptive parents agreed to feed and cloth their new boarder. In exchange, the contract made the child in effect an indentured worker until age eighteen or twenty-one. If the grown-ups were dissatisfied with their new family member, they could send him or her back at the Society’s expense. Many orphans were welcomed into and became part of loving families; many more grew up as unpaid farm laborers.
The Orphan Train program began fading out in the 1920s. Various states passed laws to prevent undesirable immigrants from crossing their borders. In 1899, Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota enacted legislation prohibiting the placement of “incorrigible, diseased, insane or criminal” children within their state boundaries. Other states quickly followed. By 1930, as the Great Depression settled over the country, the Orphan Trains ended.
The refurbished Union Pacific depot in Concordia Kansas recently opened as the National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center. There is no record of a visit by the current occupant of the White House nor the current first lady.
I’m sure that Herr Trump und Herr Miller would love to put the children into boxcars but the destination would not be a farm if they had their way.
Interesting! I had no idea, or no memory of learning this in History. Thanks!