Novels fill the New York City streets of the mid-nineteenth century with hawkers selling corn from pushcarts, beggars wrapped like mummies in strips of tattered cloth, barefoot children with grimy faces picking rags from the gutters to sell. If the fictional children have homes, they live in tenements that smell of garbage and garlic, sleeping six to a mattress. If their family is part of the “deserving poor,” they keep their floor scrubbed and a Bible on the table. Otherwise, they might live in a shanty among chickens and towers of scrap metal, sewing piecework or shining shoes to help their families scrape by. Girls without homes dance on the street or sweep crossings or become sex workers; boys join street gangs and are routinely thrown in the Tombs, the infamous jail in the Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Whether their work is honest or not, these children’s futures hold no hope for anything but basic survival—that’s all their poor parents can achieve, which is why so many of them succumb to the bottle.
It might seem odd that children in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s would want to read scores of books that hashed out such depressing melodrama. But in each of the books that featured this narrative, the plot suddenly changes after setting this doleful scene, when a Protestant minister named Charles Loring Brace steps in. His charity, the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), has a bold plan: to send “street urchins” west on the newly expanded railroads. In the West—the Midwest, really—there is plenty of everything: clean air, apple orchards, warm beds, and, most importantly, farm families in need of labor and in want of children to love as their own. By living and working among these good, hardy people, the children would have a chance to make something of themselves.
The first novel to sell this story to young readers and renew interest in this slice of American history was James Magnuson and Dorothea G. Petrie’s 1978 Orphan Train, a title that hits on precisely what makes these stories appealing: the expedition that comes after the setup sketched out above and the fact that the children heading west are parentless, either by death, neglect, or abandonment.
I’ve long been aware that everyone loves a fictional orphan. I’m an orphan myself—both my parents died of cancer, my mom when I was twelve and my dad when I was fourteen. Orphan narratives have haunted my loss; their popular tropes, which get so much wrong about parental bereavement, color how people perceive my experience. Too many fictional orphans come to mind, from the mid-1800s to now: Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer, Anne Shirley, Little Orphan Annie, all the way up to Harry Potter. Orphans, with their built-in conflict and lack of adult supervision, are perfectly suited to pint-size hero’s journeys. Add in the excitement of rail travel west and just enough history to make the stories feel authentic—Brace and his charity existed outside the parameters of the novels—and you have a narrative ripe for perpetuating American myths and morals. Which is precisely what the hundreds of books that came after the original Orphan Train produce, concealing the dark, seventy-five-year history of placing approximately a quarter of a million poor urban children with barely vetted families in rural areas all over the United States, creating the blueprint for modern foster care.