Becoming an Orphan Train Rider
The reputation of orphan train riders was that they were juvenile delinquents who had gotten into trouble in New York City or another large city in the East. Was this fact or fiction? Who became a Rider and why? The State of New York created laws that allowed the Juvenile Asylums and orphanages to exist as guardians of children. At almost every period of the history of the orphan train, the children in the asylums and orphanages were not all orphans. Sometimes as many as half of the children in the New York Juvenile Asylum had never lost a parent. Others had at least one parent. Only a small percentage of the children who entered the New York Juvenile Asylum were sent West. The majority were educated there, indentured out in New York or returned to their parents after the parents were better able to care for their children.
Some of those children arrived at the asylum because they were picked up for loitering, stealing or begging. The "magistrate" sent these children to the home. Children brought by the magistrate could not be sent West -- the parents had not authorized the asylum to send their children West. Still, the children who were sent West were sometimes labelled as petty criminals by ignorant people who did not know the facts. The great majority of children who came West came because of poverty.
Other children came to the home because their parents brought them there. Usually a parent would bring children to the home when they were unable to house and feed them. Sometimes they brought their children because they could not control them. Other times a widowed parent would be unable to take care of a child alone. Many of these parents had the hope that they would have the ability to care for their children again and did not give up their right to reclaim their children. Those children could not be sent West. Children could only be sent West if the parent gave up all rights to the children, or if the children were actual orphans. Some parents felt that their children would have a better chance living in the West.
In the 19th century there were no day care facilities. Laundry had to be done by hand. Stoves had to be filled with wood or coal, water hauled and food obtained on a frequent basis. A working person did not have time to perform a job six days a week and also do all the work that having a home entailed. Single men lived in boardinghouses, as did widowed men. Without women to perform all the free labor that a wife performed, men had to have a landlady to do the same. Widowed women would have to work just as many hours as a man, but would make less money for her labor and could not, therefore, provide a home for her fatherless children.
One man who helped place children in the West said that children were discarded by their parents when the parent wanted to remarry. Some times the new spouse did not want to be burdened with the children of a previous marriage. The custody rights to these children would have been relinquished and the children sent West.
Some times children surrendered themselves to the asylums for the food and shelter they would receive there. If they reported that they had no parents they could be sent West.
The Orphan Train Riders were scarred emotionally and mentally from the reputation that preceded them in to the West. They were not juvenile delinquents, they were children of misfortune who had the bad luck to be born to poor parents or the bad luck to lose their parents through death or remarriage. Many Orphan Train Riders would not speak of their experiences or claim the status of an Orphan Train Rider decades later -- because of the stigma they had accepted with that name.
