Adoption History: Orphan Trains

0:00Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. We're the Nelson's. I'm Shaun. And I'm Lanette. And we are excited to be back with more episodes for our celebration of National Adoption Month. Yeah, we hope that the things that we share this month, typically about three episodes a week, will help you in your observation of and recognition of National Adoption Month. Yeah, we're really grateful for the opportunity to be sharing different perspectives and opinions and always looking for that chance to learn.

0:33It's really one of our big themes here to listen and learn, especially listen and learn from adoptees, but also from birth parents. There's always something new that we can learn to help us do better going forward. Yeah, so this month we're putting out several episodes a week. You'll hear episodes conducted by us or by Alicia Gallacher, who's our director of communications. And again, we just hope to kind of flood the podcast sphere with adoption content for this month. Also, we're getting really close to 100 episodes, which is super exciting. So this

1:05is helping with that too. A little side perk. Perfect. So we hope you enjoyed this episode and at the end we'll chat just a little bit about our newsletter. If you are not subscribed to our newsletter, I'll ask you right now to go ahead and look it up if you're interested in getting more adoption related content in your inbox. So go on over to openadoptionproject.org and click on newsletter to sign up. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about part of the history of

1:35adoption in the United States. We're going to be talking specifically about the orphan train, which I didn't know much about the orphan train until more recently. There have been some books written recently that talk about the orphan train and I was intrigued as I started learning a bit about it and looked up some more books and found this book that was written by an author. Her name is Andrea Warren and it seems like it's written for like middle grade audiences, but as adults we read this and thought it was an excellent book and it's a really quick read. Yeah, I think the audio book is like 40 minutes longer.

2:07It's longer. We listen to it on double speed, but it's about an hour and a half, I think. And so it's a pretty quick read and it's very like dense history. It's a really emotional book. She does a great job of sharing people who have positive experiences, negative experiences in between because most experiences really are a mix and it's a fantastic book. So we're going to be using that as a kind of template as we talk. Yeah, so we both just actually re-listened to this within the last few days, but probably two months ago or three months ago, we each listened to it

2:40independently and I remember listening to it on a run one day and it's probably one of the most ineffective runs that I've been on because every time I had it. You were so preoccupied. Well, yeah, because I knew we were eventually going to do an episode about it and so I'd stop and take notes and I found myself stopping a ton. So it was not the best for me in that situation to do a run, but what a great book highlighting some of the history of adoption. Yeah, and really great if you feel like you don't feel like you have time to read a bunch about history like this. I think this is a really important book

3:13for people in the adoption community to read and it is very accessible. It's written for a younger audience, so you could read it with your children if you wanted to and it's just powerful. I have thought back on what I read initially multiple times and re-reading it. I got even more out of it. It's a great... Well, and it's really interesting too. I mean, we'll talk about a lot of these things today, but a lot of the verbiage and just, yeah, there's the lingo that we use in the adoption world comes

3:43from this period of time in the United States. At least we think so. Yeah, we're not historians. But based on what we read in this book, yeah, I was shocked to see how much seems to have transferred over. So just a little bit of background before we jump in and talk more specifically about the book and the experiences that the book talked about. So in the 1850s, there was a man. I think he was a minister and he was in New York City. His name was Charles Loring Brace and he is really the one who founded

4:13this movement of orphan trains. So he started it off as a free foster home movement. He was concerned about the large number of immigrant children who were sleeping on the streets in New York and it sounds like he was really idealistic like a lot of young people often are and he had a really idealized for view of what he thought the West was. And when we talk about the West in this context, he's really talking about the Midwest and the South as we know it today in the United States. But he was really seeking to provide

4:46homes for these kids who were living on the streets and didn't have stable home or family life. And so he would advertise for families willing to provide free homes for these children, whether as a charity or as a way for them to get help with labor in their Western frontier homes. And in many cases, these children were placed in circumstances that were similar to indentured servitude, which is really what a lot of the adoption scenarios

5:17that you'll read about in the earlier periods of the United States were. It was really more of an indentured servitude kind of vibe, but not really what he would think of adoption nowadays as being like. And so all of this really became the foundation for the foster care movement as we know it today. It's kind of a conundrum though, right? Because yeah, he definitely saved lives and helped some children get into way better situations. But also a lot of these placements and practices were very unethical, sketchy,

5:50very sketchy. There were a lot of things that were messy and just, yeah, they were very iffy. So it's complicated. Yep, for sure. Well, some might ask like, why does knowing the history of adoption matter? Yeah. And I think, I mean, this episode really is only going to dive into talking about the orphan training in the United States, but and that's just a fraction of the history, at least in the US. But it's important for us to know, as those who are

6:22involved in the adoption community, so that we learn from the past and that we keep moving forward in the future. Well, yeah, we talk about that a lot lately, right? The importance of knowing history so that we don't repeat our past mistakes. Yeah. And how much, even just rereading this book in the last few days, I feel like I've relearned things that it's hard sometimes to remember the lessons we've learned if we don't keep them close and apply them. And so, learning the history, learning the things that happened that were probably

6:54sketchy and shady and should not have happened in adoption, I think that's so important in helping us hopefully not repeat those mistakes and hopefully learn to do better. Yeah. And I think it would help us to keep things more ethical, safe, and just good, right? So, the orphan trains, they operated from 1854 through 1929. So, roughly 70 years, right? Yeah. And they relocated with these orphan trains nearly, or approximately 200,000 children. That is a ton of kids. And a

7:31part of our history that I don't think it's talked about a lot, though it makes up the history of a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah, at the end of the book, the author talked about how all of these children went on and what was the statistic she had? She said that the children's aid society, not quite, the society claimed that 87%. Yeah, I think you had it backwards. 87% of the train riders had done well according to the society that had placed them, right? And even she

8:05said like, what does done well mean? We don't really know, but we don't know how they... During that 76-year period, 87% had seemingly positive outcomes. And I don't know how much I would rely on that, right? Totally. But she did talk about how there were several well-known politicians and others in the country who were well-known, who were children who rode the orphan trains. Yeah. People who became senators and lawyers and doctors and a

8:35Supreme Court justice, right? So all of these people that were involved. So the orphan train, the orphan train rider, was written by Andrea Warren and talks about the protagonist or the main character. It's not really protagonist, it's nonfiction. Yeah. But yeah, she talks about Lee is the main subject of this book. And she shares a lot of accounts from other people who rode the orphan trains too. But she really focuses on Lee. So basically, like me, the high-level overview of this book is his story about being separated from his family and how he is put on train with some of his brothers, shipped across the country, eventually separated from another brother and his and both brothers, ultimately being adopted by a family.

9:23And we're going to try not to spoil things too much, but yeah, really quick, we probably will be spoiling a little bit. Being he's adopted by a family and in the end of the book, we learned that he's reconnected with some of his biological siblings. And we're going to talk more about that in a few minutes, because that was powerful to me. Yeah. But that's kind of the high level. Yeah, that's a good story of Lee. It's a good summary. Yeah. So we're going to just jump in and we're going to talk about some things that stood out to us from the book that are poignant for us today and probably important for us to know.

9:56Yeah. So one thing that stood out was that Charles Brace used the term placing out for the children that were sent off on these orphan trains and taken into homes in the West. And that's a term I've heard before, right, hon? Yeah. They're being placed with us, our children. That's the term that adoption agencies will often use instead of giving up, they'll say placed or placed out for adoptions. And that has been in the adoption vernacular since the 1850s.

10:30I mean, as far as we know, yeah, I thought that was really interesting that that has stuck around for so long. I thought so too. It's one of many things throughout the book that I'm just like, wow, did this originate here? And how has it lasted for so long? It's just interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there were a lot of holes in the histories of these children throughout the book, all of these children. But one example is Lee has a baby brother named Gerald. And he was three on the orphan train. His dad gave his baby brother to him as he was boarding the train.

11:01And he hadn't seen his baby brother since he was one year old, I think he said. Yeah. So it'd been like two years. Yeah. And Lee, nor his brother, either of his brothers who were with him, none of them knew where Gerald was for the two years before. So he had like this two year gap and they never found out like who was taking care of him. They knew it wasn't his father. And yeah, like he just doesn't have access to this part of his history, which is tragic. And so many of these kids have that. And they just shared like, I have no idea what happened between this age and this age in my life. Like the story is just...

11:36It's been lost. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the most impactful things for me, he talks, Lee talks about his experience writing this orphan train. And the women who worked with the society, they're called matrons, right? And there's this matron who was on the train with him. And she was terrible. He had this envelope that his father gave him that he was supposed to use this contact information to send a letter to his dad and let him know where he and his brothers ended up so that his dad would know where they were.

12:10Yeah. But they're on the train and the matron sees him with it and tries to take it and he like fights her off and then hides it and puts it like in his jacket pocket. But then falls asleep on the train and when he wakes up, she like stole it from him while he was sleeping. Yeah, it was awful. So it seemed as though those that were working on these trains were intentionally trying to erase connections and histories. Yes, especially because there wasn't documentation helping connect where these children were coming from.

12:43And where they were going. Where they ended up. Yeah. So heartbreaking. So that is definitely one critique of how this system worked. It's tragic. Yeah. And I mean, I think the lesson for us is the more information that we have about our children's stories or adoptees stories, we want to fill in as much of the blanks as we can. Absolutely. And this was really impactful for Lee. He said that he cried every single night. And he felt like he felt guilty his whole life that he wasn't connected to his father.

13:15And like blamed himself and it was terrible because obviously it's not his fault anyway. And oh, yeah, it was heartbreaking. Yeah. So basically all these kids are put on a train there and they go from town to town. And they're almost advertised as. Oh, it was icky commodity. You know, come come look at this beautiful white baby with black hair and blue eyes like just. They were very like it was very dehumanizing is how it felt to me just.

13:49Yeah. And you know, when people would come, they would take a child. If and if it wasn't a good placement, they could request a change. They wanted to. I mean, they wanted to make sure that there was some type of connection. A lot of these practices had good intentions. They wanted to make sure there was a connection. But at the same time, if it wasn't successful, then it's just like this kid is being tossed around and.

14:20And there wasn't really like counseling or, you know, there weren't really social workers. No. Navigating this to make sure things were done in a fair way. They weren't screening these families at all. People would just come to the train station and say, oh, I'd love to take that baby home. Yeah. And they would let them. Well, and the employees were supposed to be visiting and checking in on these kids. But the program grew so quickly that Andrea Warren says that this didn't seem to happen. They didn't actually check up on anybody. And so some of these parents didn't know what they were really signing up for.

14:55And so a lot of these kids ended up being adopted in homes when their biological families, their first families, didn't really understand the permanency here. And then a lot of the families that were adopting also didn't really understand what they were doing. They weren't really trained or. Yeah. A lot of them had really sketchy sounding goals to and these adoption practices. I don't know if I should even call it adoption because a lot of these placements were never formally legalized. Yeah.

15:26And so it's hard to say like. Well, and kind of going back a little bit, a lot of the kids that were put on trains were done so because, you know, they lost a mother or a father and their parent couldn't take care of them anymore. Whether that was emotionally or financially, many parents actually put their children in an orphanage when they were struggling financially and with the hopes of coming and getting them once they got themselves back on their feet. In fact, in my personal family history, my grandfather and his brother and sister were put in an orphanage in Denver and were left there for several months until my great grandfather, whose wife had left them, could.

16:09You know, make enough money to be able to support and care for them. And there was one account written by my grandpa's sister that said like, we had no idea if he was really coming back because so many parents there didn't. Yeah. And kind of going back to New York where there were a lot of children coming out of New York from immigrant families who weren't who didn't have enough money to care for their children. Or for the undereducated in the region. And they were filling out papers or signing papers that they didn't understand.

16:45Yeah, whether they couldn't read it or they didn't understand really what they were signing. The legalese of it. It was very unethical and that still happens. I don't know if it still happens today, but we've talked to people on the podcast who were adopted from different countries outside of the United States, who this has happened to like in recent history. In the last 20 years. Yeah, like people whose first parents took them to an orphanage with the same kind of expectations of I'm going to come back for them. And then they'd come back a few weeks later and that child had been adopted by a family in the United States and they were gone.

17:16Yeah. And so really raises a lot of questions about how we can better support families and keep families together when possible. Well, and ultimately we'll get here in a minute, but ultimately the adoption trains stopped. Orphan trains. Sorry, the orphan trains stopped because of the legalization of adoptions and the laws behind adoption began to change in positive ways. And well, and the welfare programs in the country started.

17:48Yeah. And so they established these programs that were better able to support families and help families who were less well off to keep their children and care for their children. Yeah. So, which is wonderful that that was a result possibly partially because of the orphan trains. But sad that it took so long to get there. So sad. So kids are put on the train, they're, they've left their biological families, they're placed out. And they weren't allowed to have keepsakes or keep any connections or ways to find their first family.

18:20It wasn't just an isolated event that happened to Lee. But that was like the policy. They couldn't keep. Keepsakes that would link them to their biological families. Yeah. I remember in the book that one writer was arrested for trying to steal his own information back. Yeah. That was crazy. Yeah. And his later life, he was arrested for trying to get his own information. And that's also crazy to me because we think of all of these different things we hear about how adoptees are still in so many states in the United States fighting for access to their own birth certificates and their records.

19:01And we still have struggles with that today. And oh, how frustrating, right? That we have been make like struggling with these same mistakes and errors over so long. Yes. Right. Yeah. And one thing I thought that was really fascinating was that when these children were taken in by families, sometimes it was like an adoption situation. And in the case of Lee, like... We don't want to spoil that too much. It's a little bit more positive for him. In the end, in the end, yeah. But many of them had their names changed because like there was one example of how, you know, this particular person didn't like a politician from New York.

19:43And this kid had the same name as that politician. He's like, there's no way I'm having a son from New York with that name. And so they changed the name, right? Yeah, crazy thing. Well, they talked about some of the reasons people adopted these kids or brought them into their homes. And yeah, there was like situations where the family would name the child after a different child that they had biologically had who had passed away. The deceased, yeah. And try to like make them a kind of stand in for this deceased child or they wanted to have someone to care for them in their old age because they didn't have children.

20:13Or they wanted someone to carry on their family name or they wanted someone to work around the house. A lot of these children were placed into abusive situations. One thing that was incredibly creepy to me was that one person accounted that the 14-year-old girls who were really pretty went super fast on the orphan train. And I was just like, how terrifying and how awful that there weren't protections for these girls. Yeah, so that's a pretty rough part of this history. Yeah, there definitely are some major issues that we need to address.

20:49But there were some good things that happened too. It was, like I said, it's very mixed. It's hard to really categorize it all as this success or failure, right? Because it's so fluid. Yeah. Well, and the author writes that everyone wanted infants and older children needed homes. But they said, she said that those who were sickly or who had special needs or any children who were not white, they generally weren't even allowed to ride on the train because they knew that they wouldn't be in demand.

21:23They wouldn't be able to find homes for these kids if they were sickly or had special needs or didn't look the way that they thought these families in the west would want them to look. And so only the children who they thought had the best chance of being chosen were allowed to ride. Well, and the ads that they put at different train stations basically said, hey, here's a free child with a 90-day trial. Yeah, how messed up. I can't even. Yikes. Yeah. Like literal child trafficking. Yeah.

21:53Well, and then some of the children said it became like a spectacle. Like so many people would come to these train stations. And they felt like puppies at the pound. Yeah. And nobody, like there were tons of people there just to watch what was happening, not because they were there to take in a child, but they wanted to watch who picked who and why. And siblings were separated. Lee talks about how one man like treated him in such a dehumanizing way trying to decide if he was interested in him, like stuck his hand in his mouth and was feeling his teeth. To make sure they...

22:23Just didn't even say anything. Just like imagine some random dude just walks up and sticks his hand in your mouth to feel your teeth. That's weird. Yeah. But yeah, very sad ways that these children were treated. One thing that was really sad to me is that there was a lot of stigma about orphans and those who were adopted from the orphan trains during this time period. And a lot of that stigma feels really familiar. It feels like a lot of it has kind of stayed with our culture and our society, even though it's been a long time.

22:54It's been over 100 years, almost 200 years for the longest. Yeah, it ended over just not even 100 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a really long time and a lot of the stigma is still there. So the way they talked about these children, they were teased at school, people told them that they weren't wanted, they weren't loved. Well, and some people found out that they were adopted, because some of them were taken in really young. Adopted as orphans, yeah. And so some of them were told by peers or friends at school of their story rather than it coming from their parents.

23:28Adopted parents, yeah. Like not knowing that they rode this orphan train. Yeah. And some of these children shared that they never really bonded with their new families or that they never felt safe. But again, I want to play the advocate here of there were some really good people that were doing some really good things. One girl mentioned that her adopted mom said that, I really, really wish I could have known your biological mom because you're such a wonderful girl.

24:00And I imagine she was a wonderful woman. And so like there was there was positive language about birth parents or biological parents. And I'm sure that that affected children both positively and negatively, right? Yeah. Like it does today. We know today that it affects your children, how you speak about their biological family is really important. Yeah, I really loved that part too. And so Lee, we don't want to spoil the story because we want you to be able to read his account and read this book.

24:32But Lee went through a lot of hard stuff trying to figure out where he was going to go. His baby brother was taken by a family and then his other brother joined a family and he did not. And so I guess technically he has a brother named Leo. It's very confusing. Lee's name was not Lee at this time. So he did not have a brother with almost the exact same name of him as him at that time. His name was changed later. But Lee and Leo were actually taken in by the same family for a while.

25:05And I am assuming that the adoptive family decided it wasn't a good fit with Lee, but they wanted to keep Leo. And so there was no conversation with either boy about what was going to happen. But one day this matron who had taken his envelope, who he hates, she just shows up at the house. Takes him away? Takes him away. Luckily it wasn't too far. But he didn't know that at the time. And his little brother was crying and trying to chase after him. And there was no real conversation about what was going to happen.

25:36He was heartbroken for a while and went through some more hard stuff before eventually finding an adoptive family that he stayed with. But I thought that was so sad that there was no dialogue. There was no one treating it. It goes with everything else we've been talking about. Very demonizing. Where these children really weren't treated like humans. They were treated like second-class citizens because they were, I don't know, destitute, possibly orphaned. Just really sad. Yeah. So we wanted to do this episode to just highlight again an aspect of adoption history in the United States.

26:11This book is great. Like Lanette said, it's a really quick read, really easy read. There are several movies that have been created about the orphan trains. And there's other books too. There's a more popular book that I think is historical fiction that talks about the orphan train. I liked this one though because it's sharing true accounts. And I feel like it presents things fairly balanced. But yeah, really fascinating. One thing I did want to talk about was when I hate to spoil it. I thought this was important to talk about.

26:42So when Lee finally found the home that he was going to stay in, his adoptive mom said a prayer at dinner, right? Like she said, grace. And in her prayer, she expressed gratitude for him. And he said he felt so shocked because he had never heard anyone express gratitude for him. He had never felt wanted. And she in the prayer said, like, thank you God for our new son or something on those lines. And then a few minutes later, she and her husband take him out to the town

27:15and stopped to talk to every person they passed and said, this is our new son. We are so grateful for him. Well, and I think he mentioned too specifically he's like, not only did I gain a new mom and dad, but I gained aunts and uncles and a grandma who loved me fiercely. And it reminded me a little bit of conversations we've had in the past about the role of adoptive grandparents in helping someone feel like they are accepted into the family. Absolutely. Michael Grant talked about that. That was a really important takeaway for me from that conversation.

27:46So a few more highlights from this book and especially from Lee's experience that I really thought we should talk about just really quick. So he spent his summers. I'm trying really hard to not spoil things too much, but he spent his summers with his brothers after they were all adopted by different families. And I thought that was cool. Yeah. So they weren't far apart geographically and they knew that they had been placed in homes close to one another. And so they were able, their adopted parents made it so that they could spend time together in the summers.

28:19Yeah. I thought that was beautiful. So it was like open adoption with part of his birth family, right? With his brothers. And it sounds like there wasn't really any issue of insecurities from adoptive families or anything getting in the way. They were all able to stay connected to each other. And Lee also talked about how ultimately he was able to form these strong and loving bonds with his adopted family. But even though he really loved them, he thought of them as his mom and dad, he still struggled with loss and with this lack of knowledge that he had about his first family.

28:52Yeah. And he was late in life in the book at accounts for the reconnection to some of his older siblings that weren't put on the orphanage. And he only really met one. But yeah, it was hugely impactful to him and his feelings of personal identity getting to meet one of his older siblings. Well, yeah. And he said, it was kind of interesting how he said it. Like going into it, I didn't think he would have a very big impact on me. Like I had lived my whole life without him. Yeah.

29:22And he said when they walked into the room, they just ran to each other and embraced one another. And for the rest of his brother's life, they had a really meaningful relationship, great connection. Yeah, that was beautiful. And obviously we're not doing it justice. Please read this book. For sure. But one more thing that he shared that I thought was really sound advice for all of us was that we can't control our circumstances, but we can control our reactions. And he said that he was grateful that ultimately he was able to let go of that anger he felt,

29:56especially after that matron took his envelope and all of these horrible things happened that we didn't really go into. But you can read about it in the book, all these horrible things happened, but he was able to release that anger over time and turn these tragic experiences he had into triumph. Yeah, again, that take away from me. I really liked he said like we can't control what happened to us. But we can control how we respond. So the orphan trains ran for 76 years.

30:27It sounds like a lot of them did okay. A lot of the kids, yeah. But there were also a lot who were abused and who were treated very poorly. Yeah. So in 1930. In the thirties. Yeah. And yeah, there's some discrepancy on dates. But we know that child labor laws started to be put into place in the early 1930s, which restricted a lot of what was happening kind of that indentured servitude where young kids were being put to work.

31:03And also like Lanette mentioned earlier, they started having wealth, the welfare program in the United States, which was supporting families that needed help and didn't have to put their child in a situation where they were in an orphanage or place them out, right? And orphanages started to close. Really, the 1930s was a big shift in child care and caring for those that didn't have family members. And thank goodness. I am so grateful for the changes we've made.

31:33But at the same time, I really was surprised by reading this book coming to terms with these feelings of, wow, we still have a long way to go. It's been more than... Yeah. I mean, we're coming up on 100 years since this ended. Since it ended, yeah. And we still have some room to grow. Absolutely. Which is why we're talking about it. Yeah, the book is called Orphan Train Writer. And it's by Andrea Warren. Go check it out. Go take a listen to it, read it, and let us know what you think.

32:07Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Open Adoption Project. Yeah, we're so grateful to be able to share a lot of content this month, November 2023, for National Adoption Month. Yeah. So we would love to remind you to subscribe to our newsletter if you have not done that yet. You can go to openadoptionproject.org and click on newsletter. And there's a subscription form right there that you can fill out. Yeah. Also, connect with us on social media. We're on Instagram and on Facebook at Open Adoption Project.

32:38Yeah, thank you so much for being here and learning with us as we just keep talking and talking about all of these different nuances of adoption.

Transcripts are generated automatically and may contain errors.