John Griffith, Orphan Train Rider

John Griffith (1879 - 1936) came to Illinois in 1889 and settled in Odell, Livingston County. This could be the town with the most documented orphan train riders in the annual reports. John Griffiths lived with D. A. Langford. Langford's statements in his letter are contradictory in that he says will keep John "as long as he does well" and that he will "do for him the same as if he were our own child," unless of course Langford was only willing to give his own child a home as long as he performed to a satisfactory degree.

John was receiving letters from his father as a boy. His father was Daniel Griffith, but he did not know his mother's name at the time of his marriage to Mabel Crow, a young woman from Graymont, Illinois. They had one daughter, Mary, but the 1920 census indicated that although Mary was born in Illinois, the nativity of neither of her parents was known, indicating that Mary was also an orphan.

When John registered for the draft in 1917 he noted the loss of one eye as a disability. At the asylum the disease that was acknowledged most frequently was ophthalmia, which was a very serious condition amongst infants, causing blindness in some cases. However, the asylum did not take infants and how this disease affected the older children is not described. The medical reports of the asylum are merely lists of the diseases experienced without detail. There were no incidents of tuberculosis reported, which seems almost impossible when considering the prevalence of tuberculosis in the early part of the 20th century. Possibly those children were weeded out during an incoming examination. The asylum did report in 1856 such cross-contamination measures as separate beds, facecloths and washbasin for each child.

John died September 30, 1936 in Pontiac, Illinois. Mabel died on the 29th, as a result of the same automobile crash that eventually killed John. The death announcements confirm that their daughter, Mrs. Glenn Fosdick, was adopted. John had been working in the shoe factory in Pontiac and Mabel was the superintendent of the WPA sewing circle in Pontiac.