"Local" Orphans

Not all children who were indentured out to farmers were from the East Coast "Orphan trains" -- In the town where I live, Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, there were five different institutions seeking homes for children. The Illinois Soldiers and Sailors Children's School indentured children out and found homes for children who were aged out of that system. (age 14 in its earliest years.) The Baby Fold, a home for children under the age of 6, provided children for adoption or housed children during times of family stress. The Girl's Industrial Home, or the Lucy Orme Morgan Home, indentured girls out in its early days. Boys were sent to the Victory Hall and African American Children went to the Colored Children's Home, later known as the Booker T. Washington Home. In Illinois children were also sent to the poor farm -- where people too aged to take care of themselves, the insane, the mentally ill, and the crippled went to live in the most abject conditions, because the State of Illinois did not choose to create state institutions for its children (other than ISOH). There was a steady flow of children available for adoption or indenture in Illinois, competing with the flow of children from the Orphan trains. To a great extent the flow of children to Illinois from other places was prevented by law after 1898.

In 1905 the State of Illinois finally began publishing a record of the children farmed out by the various charities and homes in Illinois, which were usually private organizations. Because of the lack of response by the state, local women would organize and fund homes for the children of their community through club work -- part of the unpaid labor of women.

A table from the Report of the Illinois Department of Visitation details the number of children flowing from Illinois institutions into Illinois homes as well as other states from 1905 to 1910.

Quite obviously, the children sent to places such as Alabama, Washington, Wyoming and other far flung states were never "visited" by the agents of Illinois and were left to fend on their own. But 6,549 stayed in Illinois, a massive number compared to 6,055 sent to Illinois by the New York Juvenile Asylum from 1855 to 1899. The problem of abandoned or poverty stricken children was growing at an exponential rate in Illinois.

This is the list of child placing agencies recognized by the State Department of Visitation in 1910: