The Railroads of the Orphan Train

If you look at the map of orphan train riders, you can see that just about every county in the state was touched by the orphan train movement. How did this happen? How did they so completely fill the state with orphans?

A map of the railroads in Illinois, from 1850 to 1860 shows how this was accomplished. In a startlingly short space of time, the State of Illinois was completely crisscrossed with railroad lines!

As we can see the coverage was less in the southern part of the state (where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers provided transportation), but in other parts of the state the railroads were within reach of many cities and towns. By 1855, when the orphan trains were just reaching Illinois, the state was easily traversed by rail.

However, it is interesting to note that one of the first counties to actually ask for and receive orphans, Vermilion, did not have a major railroad line until the 1860s. The first train to come to Danville was the Pioneer on the Toledo and Wabash Western Railway, a smaller line out of Toledo, Indiana in 1856. Perhaps it was this line that carried orphans from New York. Some children however, did travel by water transportation rather than railroad the entire route, and although Danville is not ON the Vermilion River, perhaps part of the children's route was by water to reach Danville.

So, transportation within Illinois was no bar to distributing the children from railroad stops all over Illinois. In viewing the map it is interesting to note that one of the most important railroad towns, Galesburg, had no orphan children who were noticed in the Annual Reports. Dixon, in Lee County had numerous children, as did Decatur, in Macon County. The tiny town of Odell was featured many times in the Annual Reports and was just a tiny stop on the St. Louis, Alton and Chicago Railroad.

The area to the north and south of Jacksonville, Illinois is the area with the least orphans reporting to the Asylum. It was well served by the railroads, but the Asylum was dependent to a certain degree on the railroads granting concessions on tickets prices to the orphans and their escorts. Also, the Asylum was not willing to send children where they could not easily check in on them. Without cheap passes, the agents would not be willing to leave children in areas they could not easily reach.

The numbers of orphans in southern Illinois was affected by attitudes in the south. The people settling in the south of Illinois were not as supportive of the Asylum work because of their church affiliations. The people of southern Illinois, who were mainly Baptists, were less likely to have connections to the Asylum workers which would facilitate emigration. Also, some of the earliest detractors of the orphan train movement were pro slavery agitators, who compared orphan resettlement to slavery. They were apt to call the Asylum backers hypocrites and compare their work to slavery among whites.