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Since 1991, orphan train riders and their descendants have gathered each July to share stories of their unique heritage. The Louisiana Orphan Train Museum (shown above) opened in Opelousas in October 2010 and the annual gathering now takes place at the museum. This year’s gather will be held at the museum on Saturday, July 14 from 1-5 p.m.
Thousands of orphans came to La. via trains after the Civil War
By Chris Rieger and John Michael Lockhart
The story of the Orphan Train Movement, an ambitious and eventually controversial effort to rescue poor and homeless children, began a few years before the start of the Civil War at a time when an estimated 30,000 children roamed the streets of New York in search of money, food and shelter. Conditions in big cities were unsanitary and the homeless children were too often victims of disease and crime. Many sold matches, rags, or newspapers to survive.-For protectunra^ainst street -viatenrc, tWcv-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 City to complete his seminary training. Horrified by the Rev. Charles L. Brace conditions he saw on the street, Brace was persuaded there was only one way to help these "children of unhappy fortune."
"The gre#t duty is to get (them) utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country," he wrote.
In 1853, Brace founded the Children's Aid Society to arrange the trips, raise the money, and obtain the legal permissions needed for relocation.
From 1854 to 1929, when federal legislation was finally passed to stop the transportation of children over state lines, between 150,000 and 250,000-plus orphans from the East Coast, especially New York and Boston, were sent to the South and West on these "orphan trains," as they came to be known.
Several different organizations arranged for children to be put on orphan trains. The Children's Aid Society of New York City, founded by Brace, and the New York Foundling Hospital, run by nuns, were two of the most well known. Most of the children that were relocated to Louisiana were sent by the Foundling Hospital, which was established after the Civil War by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent
In 1907, three trains carrying orphaned and abandoned children from New York City stopped in Opelousas. Accordin siana Orphan Train Society, each of those trains carried about 50 English-speaking, orphaned children to the French-s| By some estimates, more than 2000 orphans arrived in Louisiana between 1907 and 1929. Over the years, the Loui trains also stopped in Marksville, Mansura, New Iberia, Baton Rouge, Morgan City, Lafayette and New Orleans. Most of were German and Irish immigrants who were adopted by French-speaking parents. Today Alice G. Bernard is the Louisiana survivor of the Orphan Train Movement. Now 96, she lives in an assisted living community in Lafayette. The | is of a mural depicting the orphans’ arrival in Opelousas, which is on display at the Louisiana Orphan Train Museum, opened in Opelousas in October 2009.
THE
By John Michael Lockhart
At the age of 96, Alice Geoffrey Bernard is beginning to enjoy her celebrity status. But for the first eight decades of her long life, she was ashamed of the event that has garnered her so much positive press in recent years.
Born Alice Kearns in New York City in March of 1916, her unwed mother gave her up for adoption and she spent the first years of her life in an orphanage.
At the tender age of three, Alice was placed on a passenger train that carried her from New York to New Iberia with these words pinned to her dress: "Mr. and Mrs. Auguste Geoffroy, a family from Delcambre, LA."
Auguste Geoffroy was a French-speaking farmer in Vermillion Parish who was on his second marriage and had lost his only child to the Spanish Flu that had torn through Louisiana the
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gal guardians and the other people she encountered as a young girl in Vermillion Parish, she had to learn to speak French, which she mastered quickly. But, just two years after her arrival, French was banned from schools when Louisiana's new state constitution was passed in 1921 and, like the other French-speaking children in Acadiana, she was only allowed to speak English in the classroom when she entered first grade.
By then, she had forgotten her native English language and was forced to learn it all over again. Over the years, she not only managed to remain fluent in French, but also learned to read and write it, though she concedes she rarely comes across anyone with whom she can converse with in French today.
Looking back on her childhood, Alice says she has many bad memories.
"T waQ VmlliArl a lot ho-