The Orphan Trains

fuzzybuddy

fuzzybuddy

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Location
The Sticks, Northeast PA.
I heard about this on a local documentary TV program. From the mid 1850s to 1929, they would round up orphan kids in cities, put them on a train, roll them out to rural areas. The kids would stand there at the station, and if you liked a kid you took him home. The kids would pile back onto the train to the next town. Anybody could walk off with a kid. Yeah, they got orphans off the streets: but God knows, who just walked off with a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train
 

Sounds like a pedophile's dream come true. OTOH, it was an inexpensive way to adopt and give a child a good home, but without any vetting of the potential parents, who knows if that happened?
 

fuzzybuddy said:
I heard about this on a local documentary TV program. From the mid 1850s to 1929, they would round up orphan kids in cities, put them on a train, roll them out to rural areas. The kids would stand there at the station, and if you liked a kid you took him home. The kids would pile back onto the train to the next town. Anybody could walk off with a kid. Yeah, they got orphans off the streets: but God knows, who just walked off with a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train
Click to expand...
Basically the same thing that happened during the war when the govt decided to send children off to towns and villages, outside of the cities for 'safety'..
The children were taken by train all over the country , and at their destinations they were 'chosen' by people who only took them because they were being paid .. but these people were total strangers to the evacuees.. and many children were split up not only taken from their parents.. but from their siblings, because someone wanted only one child.. or only boys .. and very often these kids were slave labour...

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I just recently read that you could mail children back in the day, I got a chuckle at the thought but also realized the opportunity was there to run into all kinds of unsavory types.
 
I wonder how many ran away and headed back to familiar surroundings like little homing pigeons.

I also wonder if the odds were better for some to find a good home as opposed to all being poorly treated/abused in an orphan asylum.

Definitely not one of our finest hours as a nation.
 

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