In 1790, New York City’s population stood at about a meager 30,000 individuals compared to the millions of inhabitants that would occupy the city a century later. New York City’s population would grow to over 200,000 in 1830 and reach 800,000 inhabitants by 1860. In 1900, the city would experience a dramatic explosion in population reaching a staggering 3.5 million.
The explosion in the city’s population stemmed from a multitude of factors. With easy access to the Atlantic seaboard, New York City was becoming a central hub for international trade and business, as well as becoming a center for industrial development. Many young men and women from rural communities came to the city to find work within the growing wage labor system.
By 1825, with the completion of the Erie Canal (which allowed greater access and transportation to the Great Lakes and further West), New York became the leading jumping off point for newly arrived European immigrants seeking better fortunes in America. Yet, unable to complete their journey due to the cost of travel, some immigrants remained stranded in the growing urban city.
The dramatic increase in population and radical transformation of the American economy led to a significant shift in urban social conditions. The large influx of eager young folks and immigrants seeking work led to an oversupply in the labor force, driving wages down in the city.
The inability to secure stable jobs and wages for growing families coupled with poor city planning led to an increase in crowded tenement-style housing. These unhealthy living conditions made these “poorer classes” more susceptible to various outbreaks of disease among both adults and children (children regularly lost one or both parents, leading to an increase in child homelessness).
To supplement the income of their parent(s), especially in the event of a mother or father’s death, children regularly sought wage labor to help support their families. Other times, single parents left their children in the city (temporarily, and often with relatives) while seeking employment outside the city, hoping to return.
The greater visibility of children laboring in industrial jobs, sleeping on the streets due to homelessness, or stealing food due to hunger radically reimagined ideas of childhood in the American nation.
As the visibility of children wandering the street increased alongside the criminalization of youth vagrancy (homelessness) throughout the 1840s and 1850s, urban reform movements slowly emerged to meet the needs of poor children in the city. Many of these reform movements had started out as religious impulses against what was perceived to be growing vice in urban centers, following the stirrings of the Second Great Awakening (beginning in the 1850s).
In 1853, Protestant minister Charles Loring Brace initiated a century-long movement with the founding of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS). Brace and other agents working with the CAS were determined to rescue street children growing up in the heart of the vice and place them into the homes of hard-working families who would provide them with religious instruction, basic education, and industrial training.
In 1869, the New York Foundling Hospital added to the top organizations dedicated to placing children in new homes. Different than the CAS, the Foundling Hospital was primarily responsible for placing infants and toddlers, mostly girls, into Catholic homes across the Nation.
Though these organizations, among hundreds more, are most known for sending children to new homes in the west, the placing-out system only constituted a portion of the solutions they provided for urban children.
The West captivated the attention of many urban reformers as an idyllic setting for children to grow up. Reformers believed that by placing children with the farm families in the west, urban children could grow up in good Christian homes and learn the meaning of a good day’s work, far away from the growing vice of the city.
The desire to send children to western farming communities was coupled with a national demand in farm labor. Agricultural communities were experiencing a shift in small-scale production to larger markets by the mid nineteenth century, putting a demand on labor needed to generate higher quantities.
Sending children to the west could fill this need, for children’s labor had always been an essential element of family farms. Thus, the placement of children in the homes of farm families was believed to be a natural solution to meet the demands of farm labor and placements for children. As the demand for farm labor dwindled in the late 1920s, so did the Orphan Train placements.
The Children’s Aid Society and other sending organizations typically required family consent to place children in new homes unless the child was proven to have no living relatives. (It was common for children to have at least one living parent or relative who was unable to afford to provide for the child).
Children, in groups between a few months to 17 years, rode the trains across the west with a sending agent and additional help, depending on the age of the children in the group. The trains that carried children increased in conditions over time. Children typically took minimal items with them on the trains because the sending organizations relied heavily on donated materials from the people of New York and communities in which the trains stopped along the route.
At each stop, children were taken off and brought to a public meeting house, typically a courthouse, church, or opera house, where families could come and pick the children to bring home. The child was required to go willingly with the family, allowing children some control over the process of placement.
Families taking children were expected to furnish the children with basic necessities (i.e. food, clothing, education) and expected to sign a contract with placing organizations to outline the terms of the exchange. The intention of the contract was to alleviate any potential for abuse on part of the foster family, and supervisors continued to check-in on the child year after year.
Despite the best intentions to supervise and vet all families taking the children, scholars have found numerous instances of abuse in the Orphan Train’s placing-out system (physical, emotional, and even sexual). Still, many of the children placed into homes were adopted into loving and caring families. The experiences of the children placed west in states like Nebraska vary greatly, and many of their stories can be found among this site.