Imagine losing your parents at a young age. Your whole life would be turned upside down. According to family stories, my great-grandfather and his brother arrived in this country as orphans. They were fortunate. A family here gave them a home and a new last name. How scared they must have been in that time between losing their parents and finding a new home. How would they survive in a strange country? Would they have to work in order to eat? Where would they stay? How would they get by when they didn’t understand the language?
Many of us are fortunate enough to only imagine such a thing, but for hundreds of thousands of children in 19th century America, that scenario played out again and again. Many of those orphans were children of immigrants, with no relatives who could care for them and no generous family to take them in. They ended up in orphanages or on the streets. Unwanted. Hungry. Often reviled.
By the mid-1800s, city orphanages were crowded, and many other orphaned children roamed the streets scavenging for food and other necessities. That’s when the idea of sending orphans away from the squalor of the cities to small towns and farms took hold. People like Charles Loring Brace of the Children’s Aid Society believed these children could get a fresh start in kind, Christian homes in Middle America. Thus was born what we now call the Orphan Train movement.
The first orphans sent west by train arrived in Dowagiac, Michigan in 1854. After the success in placing the children there, trainloads of orphans continued to be sent west from eastern seaboard cities through the late 1920s. Some found wonderful new families, some did not adjust to the change, and others ended up in bad situations. PBS aired a wonderful program on Orphan Trains in their American Experience series (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/).
I am blessed that my parents are still living. There have been times, though, when I felt alone and afraid. One time before I carried a cell phone, my car died on the side of the expressway far from home. The world suddenly became a scary place. Praise God, help arrived. Have you ever experienced a time when you felt very much alone?
Leave a comment today for a chance to win my May book, The Marriage Barter, the second book in the Orphan Train series!
Leave a comment today for a chance to win my May book, The Marriage Barter, the second book in the Orphan Train series!
In Love Inspired Historical’s Orphan Train series, the last unclaimed orphans on a train headed through Nebraska meet disaster when robbers attack the train. The series starts in April with Allie Pleiter’s Family Lessons, continues in May with my book, The Marriage Barter, and wraps up in June with Linda Ford’s The Baby Compromise. Though these orphans have good people advocating for them, frightening circumstances leave them feeling alone and afraid. In time they learn that love can conquer the most frightened heart and create new families from the broken shards of our lives.
Christine Johnson
The Marriage Barter
Love Inspired Historical
May 2013
Website: http://christineelizabethjohnson.com
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