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AMSRICAN EXPERIENCE1
“ORPHAN
"TRAINS
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
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TEACHER'S GUIDE
The streets of New York were inhospitable to wandering children.
About the Program
The trains, and their destinations, were a mystery to the orphans on board.
"I had the whole future ahead of me, and I didn't know what to expect."
—	Elliot Bobo
Eighty years ago, Elliot Bobo was taken from his alcoholic father's home, given a small cardboard suitcase, and put on board an "orphan train" bound for Arkansas. Bobo never saw his father again. He was one of tens of thousands of neglected and orphaned children who over a 75-year period were uprooted from the city and sent by train to farming communities to start new lives with new families. Elliot Bobo's remarkable story is part oiThe Orphan Trains.
The story of this ambitious and finally controversial effort to rescue poor and homeless children begins in the 1850s, when thousands of children roamed the streets of New York in search of money, food and shelter—prey to disease and crime. Many sold matches, rags, or newspapers to survive. For protection against street violence, they banded together and formed gangs. Police, faced with a growing problem, were known to arrest vagrant children—some as young as five—locking them up with adult criminals.
In 1853, a young minister, Charles Loring Brace, became obsessed by the plight of these children, who because of their wanderings, were known as "street Arabs." A member of a prominent Connecticut family, Brace had come to New York to complete his seminary training. Horrified by the conditions he saw on the street, Brace was persuaded there was only one way to help these "children of unhappy fortune."
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"The great duty," he wrote, "is to get utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country."
In 1853, Brace founded the Children's Aid Society to arrange the trips, raise the money, and obtain the legal permissions needed for relocation. Between
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