TRAINS AN ANSWER TO SOCIAL PROBLEM

New York was awash with immigrants from Europe during the last half of the 19th century. They came at the rate of 1,000 per day, many large families from Ireland and Germany with promises of free land in their ears. Those who had money could pursue their dreams, those who had none remained in a city where typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever and other diseases killed and jobs were scarce.

Whole families died in some cases, but those left behind often had no means of making a living. Sometimes children were put in orphanages by fathers who went to sea and never could reclaim them. Sometimes mothers gave up their children rather than watch them starve.

At a time when the city's population was 500,000, an estimated 10,000 boys and girls were living on New York's increasingly mean streets. Gangs were rampant and 12-year-old prostitutes common. In the city's foundling hospital, 9 of 10 infants died.

The Rev. Charles Loring Brace was a 25-year-old Methodist minister who envisioned that America's vast midland could provide an answer to the city's problems. And Brace believed that a family environment, even one so far from the only home they knew, would be better for children than growing up in institutions or in slums.

He organized the Children's Aid Society and in the first year began finding homes for orphans in New England. Success there was followed in 1854 by the first of the orphan trains to the Midwest farm belt.

Eventually, orphan trains also were employed by the New York Juvenile Asylum, the New York Foundling Hospital and Boston's New England Home for Little Wanderers.

The Orphan Train Movement was criticized by some at the time as a social experiment that was no better than indentured servitude. Some in the Midwest complained that New York City simply was shipping its problems west. But for the most part, the children whose lives were altered by the train ride say it was for the better.

Two of the orphans eventually became governors, one of North Dakota and the other of Alaska Territory. Another became a Supreme Court justice. Orphan-train rider Henry Jost became mayor of Kansas City.

Their stories have been chronicled in a number of books and magazine articles and a documentary produced by A&E.

The trains ceased in 1929 for a variety of reasons. States were passing laws that helped mothers and children, and the issue of child labor had come to prominence. Thus children became less attractive as laborers.

When they stopped running, the orphan trains were all but forgotten until the aging riders and their descendants began looking for their roots.