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exactly what they wanted.
The trains to Louisiana stopped in towns across the state including Marks-ville, Mansura, Opelousas, New Iberia, Baton Rouge, Morgan City, Lafayette and New Orleans. Most of the children were German and Irish immigrants who often were adopted by French-speaking parents.
Athalie Dupre, whose husband Harold helped his father find a sister lost on the orphan trains, is a member of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America (OTHSA). She said that it was common for hospital and church officials to keep family information from the orphan train riders.
“The priests wanted to keep it quiet for the children's sake. There was such a stigma attached to being an orphan then," she said.
Harold Dupre is president of the Louisiana Orphan Train Society and is a former president of OTHSA. His father, whose birth name was George Thompson, arrived on one of the three orphan trains that stopped in Opelousas in 1907.
According to Dupre, the language barrier Vincent Tiffany discovered when he arrived had far greater consequences on his father and aunt when they arrived by train in Opelousas in 1907.
"Here's what we believe happened.
"There was more than one family of Dupres who had come to the depot to adopt children and there was more than one boy named George on the train.
"One of the Dupre families had requested a brother and sister, and they were supposed to receive my father and aunt.
"The people here only spoke French and the children arriving only spoke English.
"My father was only three when he and his sister arrived by train in Opelousas.
"The officials gave one of the Dupre families my aunt and another little boy named George. My aunt was five and old enough to know that they had made a mistake.
"She kept telling them, -'You have the wrong
icctiiiy.
Dupre says that nearly six more decades would pass before his father and aunt would meet again.
With the help of his wife, Dupre had learned of his aunt's whereabouts and set up a meeting at his home.
After that emotional day, they remained in touch, he said.
Frank McDermott experienced the stigma of having been adopted first hand growing up in West Baton Rouge Parish. He was left the day after his birth at the Foundling Hospital and was on an orphan train to Louisiana when he was only two-years-old.
Oscar and Martha McDermott adopted him after they selected him from a line of children in the Bank of Baton Rouge. The McDermotts lived in Lobdell and Frank attended Lobdell Elementary School where he remembered other children pointed at him and saying, "That's the adopted boy."
In an interview with The Advocate before his death, McDermott said that his adopted parents treated him well, even if his classmates did not.
"They were good to me. They gave me an opportunity to go to high school," he said.
McDermott even went to LSU for two years, studying journalism, but dropped out because his family couldn't afford the tuition during the Depression.
He went to work at the Port Allen Observer, doing a variety of jobs for the newspaper, including editor. When his parents died, he took over his father's water-well drilling business until he was hired by the Commissioner of Agriculture to promote the state's agricultural products in north Louisiana.
McDermott lived in Monroe where he won numerous civic awards, including 1965 Outstanding Citizen of Monroe. He continued to wonder about his natural parents. The Foundling Hospital told him only that his mother's name was Annie Kelly. One day though, McDermott received a phone call that began, "Hello. I'm Vincent Kelly Tyrell. I think I might
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Allen," said Bert Bernard, Red Coles' daughter who was living in North Hollywood, California when the Riverside Reader interviewed her in 1996.
Bernard said her father was raised as an only child, and not only did he never know his natural parents, he didn't know his adoptive father either.
"His adoptive mother was Aline Broussard Coles. He never knew his adoptive father because he died before daddy arrived in Port Allen," Bernard said.
Bernard said her father's train arrived in Port Barre where his adoptive mother, who lived in Port Allen, had relatives.
"Mama said he had a tag with his name on it, who he was going to and the stop he got off at pinned to his clothes," Bernard added.
Bernard said she didn't learn her father was adopted or that he had come to south Louisiana via an orphan train until after he had died. Coles died at age 60 in May 1964 when Bernard was only 12-years-old.
Red Coles grew up with his mother on Sixth Street in Port Allen and when he marripd Bprthilde Daigle, the newlyweds lived next to his widowed mother's home.
"It was a sensitive thing for him," said Bernard of her father, who was born Wilfred Joseph Coles.
OTHSA, founded in 1986 by Mar\? Ellen Johnson in Springdale, Ark., has helped push for the release of previously sealed information so that orphan train riders and their descendants can attempt to discover their heritage.
In an interview with the Riverside Reader in 2005, Johnson said she was working on a history book for Washington County, Arkansas when she first learned about the orphan trains.
"I was stunned," she said.
Since 1986, Johnson has written five books on the
Jim Breaux, who owned Jim's Grocery in Krotz Springs for many years, said his father helped raise one of the orphans.
"My mother's aunt had adopted one of the orphans who came over on the train. I would say he was about 15 years older than me.
"His name was Philo-jeaun Duplechain.
"When I was growing up, my dad had a fish market and Philojean used to work there and he had a room to sleep in," Breaux recalled in 2005.
According to Breaux, Duplechain died in the 1950s.
Harold C. Hill Jr. of Port Allen said there is also an "orphan train" link to his family too.
"My father's aunt and uncle adopted a child. They gave her a great education and a great life.
"(Their adoptive daughter's) mother came from Ireland and she was too poor to care for her," said Hill.
The child Hill's great aunt adopted was Mae Ko-rnbacher DePaoli.
Though DePaoli died in 1988, her daughter, Betty Obee of Baton Rouge, has collected a lot of informa-
over the years.
While growing up, Obee used to travel with her mother to New York where the family tired to get information from the Foundling Hospital.
"My father had begged them for years to tell my mother who her parents were and they always ran into a brick wall. They would say, 'You don't want to know' or 'You don't need to know.' Every one of the orphans alive today will tell you the same thing, how they begged to know," Obee told the Riverside Reader in 1996.
When interviewed by the Riverside Reader again in 2005, Obee shared an experience she had with a lady who grew up in Tum-erville, a blue-collar community that would later be annexed into the city of
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"For a field trip, we visited two homes, a small house and a big house, in Tumerville.
"The lady who gave us the tour (Brenda Blanchard) told us that an orphan from New York had grown up in the big, fancy house.
"Immediately, my ears perked up," Obee recalled.
Obee's mother had died less than two years earlier and she was hungry for any first-hand information she could obtain from the orphan train riders.
With the assistance of another teacher at St. John Elementary, Obee located Louise McKay Williamson, the orphan the tour guide had talked about.
Sadly, thousands of the orphans who had been sent south and west were placed into homes where they were treated like indentured servants, having to work hard for their keep. But Obee would learn that Williamson, like Obee's own mother, was far luckier than many of the orphans.
Daniel and Katie McKay of Tumerville had adopted Williamson.
Though Tumerville was a working class neighborhood at the turn of the cen-
cessful in the lumber trade and was able to provide well for his family.
Williamson was raised in the McKay home, which had been built in 1879, and she raised her own children, Kitty Williamson Barbay and William "Billy" Williamson, in that same home.
hard to mainta ful home she 1 from her adop In a 2005 in the Riverside ' Barbay said never wanted 1 ing adopted.
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