Correction: Mary Ellen Johnson’s research on orphan train riders led her to a woman in Savoy who was an orphan train rider as a child. The woman’s residence was incorrect in this article.
LITTLE ROCK — Before the child-welfare system began, one solution to the growing number of orphaned children in New York City was to place them on trains and send them to live with families in the West.
“In the early 1900s, trains came through Northwest Arkansas dropping off children in Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville, and on down to Subiaco near Fort Smith,” said Alison Moore of Austin, Texas, author of Riders on the Orphan Train, a historical novel published in October by Roadworthy Press. “It was America’s first foster care.”
Moore and her husband, Phil Lancaster, a musician, will give a multimedia presentation, “Riders on the Orphan Train” at 2 p.m. Dec. 8 at the Springdale Public Library.
Moore’s novel chronicles the lives of two children who were among an estimated 250,000 children who rode trains from New York City and were placed with families waiting at rail stations across the country between 1854 and 1929, according to a description of the book. The story follows the children across the Ozarks in Arkansas, the Big Bend area of West Texas, the Belen Harvey House in Belen, N.M., and the mining town of Clifton, Ariz.
“Most of the orphan train children actually weren’t ad- opted but taken into families,” Moore said.
Some orphan train riders told stories with happy endings, while others told horror stories, Moore said. Many of the children experienced loss and despair in their search for a home.
Moore began her research about the orphan train riders in the late 1990s. A Public Broadcasting Service documentary inspired her and Lancaster to put together a program with music, literature and video about what was known as a “placing out” system.
“Riders on the Orphan Train” started as an educational program for the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America in Springdale, which has since merged with the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kan. Moore and Lancaster continue to tour the country with their program and offered to give a presentation at the Springdale library, said Anne Gresham, a spokesman for the library.
The library will display a series of books, Orphan Train Riders: Their Own Stories, that contains transcribed oral histories from some of the orphans who rode the trains, Gresham said. The oral histories were compiled by Mary Ellen Johnson, who founded the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America in Springdale in 1986.
Charles Loring Brace established the Children’s Aid Society, which started a free “placing-out” program in New York in the mid-1800s to help thousands of homeless children in New York, Moore said. He thought they would have a better chance if they were taken out of New York City and sent to the developing heartland of the country. Representatives from the Children’s Aid Society rode with groups of children
Some of the children were not orphans but were surrendered by single parents who were too poor to care for their children, Moore said.
Johnson said by e-mail that in 1986, while she was working as a publisher’s assistant on the Washington County history book project, she learned of a group of 13 orphans who arrived in Springdale around June 1912. A Tulsa woman had sent a newspaper article about her family for the project. The newspaper article contained the names of several orphan children who arrived by train and the families that took them.
The Tulsa woman’s grandmother and two great-uncles were among the orphans.
“I was lucky enough to find one of these survivors living in Prairie Grove,” Johnson said. “His birth name was Mischelin but he had been adopted by the Braly family.”
Johnson’s research on orphan train riders also led her to a woman who was an orphan train rider as a child and was living in Sonora near Springdale. The woman told about children who had come to Berryville. Johnson tracked down one of those children in California who rode the train with the Sonora woman and her siblings.
From 1986 until 2003, Johnson wrote, edited and published stories of orphan train riders in a newsletter.
The Children’s Aid Society sent at least 136 children to Arkansas from 1854 to 1910, Johnson said. The society continued to send children until 1929, though she doesn’t know how many came between 1910 and 1929.
The New York Foundling Hospital also sent children to Arkansas to be placed only with Catholic families or families agreeing to raise the children in the Catholic faith. The Children’s Aid Society was a Protestant organization.
“Sad to say, there are no known survivors living in Arkansas today,” Johnson said. “However, many descendants are still in the area.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 12/01/2012