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Orphan Train Heritage Society
An Orphan Train, ca. 1900s from the Santa Fe collection of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas. Used by permission of the Kansas State Historical Society.
Disposing of Children
“The Best Method of Disposing of our Pauper and Vagrant Children” written by Charles Loring Brace in 1859 proposed “Emigration to the West” as a solution.
“The children of the poor are not essentially different from the children of the rich,” he wrote, “the same principles which influence the good or evil development of every child in comfortable circumstances, will affect, in greater or less degree, the child of poverty.”
On page 12 of the 36 page pamphlet, Brace summed up the reason for his actions. “The Emigration-plan of the Children’s Aid Society is simply to connect the supply of juvenile labor of the city with the demand from the country, and to place unfortunate, destitute vagrant and abandoned children at once in good families in the country.”
Brace’s phrase “The family is God’s Reformatory” was repeated here and in other later works of his.
On page 13, “Nor can many persons imagine the unlimited nature of the demand in America for children’s labor. The Children’s Aid Society alone has by letter or through its agents, thousands of applications each year more than it can supply, though already sending out nearly eight hundred a year.”
Opposition was raised by those fearing the children would corrupt the morals of families to which they were sent.
Others claimed their state would have the
burden of housing in state Reformatories the “criminals” from New York City dumped on them.
Brace’s defense of the Emigration-plan was written from Clinton Hall, New York, January, 1860.
The 130 year old document not only explained the reasoning of the Children’s Aid Society, but the replies to Brace’s questions about how the children were getting along gave us a trail of where the Orphan Trains went the first five years.
From Augusta, IL, Dec. 11,1859 a person identified only as H.A.K. wrote'“Some I know are prospering finely...and will ever be under deep and lasting obligations to that soul and body saving institution in which you engaged; and history will yet record many noble names who have been saved by the Children’s Aid Society, who would otherwise have dragged out a miserable existence, sickening to think of.”
Today, O.T.H.S.A. preserves this history and as many of the names as can be gathered.
Check with your local library for this and other writings by Charles Loring Brace.
Volume 9
8