Between 1854 and 1929, around 250,000 homeless, orphaned, or abandoned children in New York City were shipped to the Midwest to find foster homes. There are many horror stories about the program, of children separated from siblings, taken in as servants, or abused, while their ties with family back in New York were erased. This program came to be known as the Orphan Trains.
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The program was launched with the best of intentions, and not merely to relieve the city of a burden. The city did nothing for these children in the first place. It was the brainchild of Charles Loring Brace, a young minister who founded the Children’s Aid Society. He attended seminary near the Five Points neighborhood in the mid-19th century (portrayed in Gangs of New York) and witnessed the misery of what was estimated to be 40,000 children fending for themselves in the streets of New York. What he dubbed the Emigration Plan first placed children in foster homes in New York State, then expanded further west when more homes were needed. The massive numbers of children and their far-flung travels led to lax oversight and local officials who did not vet foster homes properly in many cases.
Despite the many horror stories, the vast majority of the children relocated had good outcomes. But the Orphan Trains were not the only way that Brace worked to help the children of New York. Sending children away from the city was pretty much the last resort. Read the story of Charles Loring Brace and his efforts to get children off the streets at The Saturday Evening Post.
Source: neatorama