Go West, Young Orphans

September 22, 2007 10:00 PM

Orphan Trains of Kansas. A collection of histories, personal stories, newspaper accounts, pictures and other references. Beginning in 1854, charitable institutions in New York City began sending orphans on trains to the west to find new families, feeling that the children would fare better out west than on the streets of New York. Orphan trains arrived in Kansas between 1867 and 1930, and some 5000-6000 children were placed in Kansas homes.
posted by amyms (30 comments total)

Before even reading this link (and it smells like something that's gonna be pretty interesting) I just wanna say: I've got first dibs on "Orphan Trains of Kansas" as a song title.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:09 PM on September 22, 2007

Why am I thinking this is a double?
posted by miss lynnster at 10:15 PM on September 22, 2007

Oh, maybe this is why...
posted by miss lynnster at 10:17 PM on September 22, 2007

Whew! You scared me, miss lynnster! Mine's not a double, but it's definitely related, and I should have linked to that previous post. Thanks for pointing it out, because I had missed it before.
posted by amyms at 10:23 PM on September 22, 2007

Hmmm. Amyms' link doesn't appear to be included in the earlier post, though. Maybe the mods will let it stand? I hope so!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:25 PM on September 22, 2007

No, it's a different link. I think the two posts work together.
posted by miss lynnster at 10:29 PM on September 22, 2007

Okay, I've got the first few lines of "Orphan Trains of Kansas". Goes like this:

Well they put me on that orphan train to Kansas
but what'n the hell was I gonna do out there?
I wanted to stay, you see, in New York City
but those bastards back in New York didn't care

So I grew up in some awful podunk nowhere
nothing but fields of wheat for miles around
but somewhere deep within my childhood memories
i still hear the sounds of dear old New York town


Maybe I'll post it to MeFi Music when it's done...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:55 PM on September 22, 2007

amyms, thank you!
posted by rockhopper at 10:57 PM on September 22, 2007

I'd adopt one.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 11:11 PM on September 22, 2007

Beginning in 1854, charitable institutions in New York City began sending orphans on trains to the west to find new families, feeling that the children would fare better out west than on the streets of New York.

I wonder if that might work today, too, but for families on long-term public assistance?

There are places in Kansas losing population every year. Schools closing for want of children, etc. The money it takes to keep a family in a crappy little apartment in a high-crime area of Cockroach City might instead pay for a free-standing house with a yard in a no-crime area of Kansas. Any aid money a family was given for housing and food and so on would of course go into the local economy and the kids would enter the local school system, so it would help people in town.

Offer families a choice. If it were my family, I'd get my kids the hell out and go west.
posted by pracowity at 11:29 PM on September 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

pracowity, it's no longer economically practical to be a subsistence farmer. The poor are better off where there are jobs, and where they can at least temporarily forgo the expense of a car. This means cities. If they get a car they can usually find better jobs in the suburbs, even if they can't afford to live there, because suburbs traditionally limit multi-family housing.

If you think rural life is a bucolic paradise, I've got a valley in West Virginia to sell you.
posted by dhartung at 11:48 PM on September 22, 2007

Almost heaven... West Virginia...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:00 AM on September 23, 2007

No, not bucolic and not farming, just a different kind of place to be living on government support. Along with the farmers, of course, who also live from government check to government check.
posted by pracowity at 12:59 AM on September 23, 2007

Nope the whole idea is rooted in the, false, belief that there is something superior about small towns and rural living. There isn't. Small towns are America's shitholes. Drug use per capita in small towns is vastly greater than in the cities. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other social evil you can concieve of is bigger in small towns than in big cities, etc.

There's a reason the small towns are shrinking and many will eventually vanish: they suck massively. People are leaving them in droves and choosing to move to the cities. Why? Because small town life sucks to a degree that is difficult for people not exposed to it to imagine.

We need to stop fueling the myth of the "heartland", and abandon the bullshit fantasy of Jefferson et al. Our culture comes from the cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc are the real heartland of America and the sooner we acknowledge this reality and stop the nonsensical adoration of small town life the better of we'll all be.

I have nothing but pity for the orphans who were taken away from any opportunity for a life of anything but mindless drudgery by the delusional twits who thought moving them away from cities would be good for them. The last thing we need, pracowity, is to repeat that tragedy of forced relocation with modern welfare recipients.
posted by sotonohito at 4:01 AM on September 23, 2007

forced relocation

Ha! You pulled that one out of your ass.

No, not all small towns are bad and not all residents of small towns are on drugs. Maybe you came from a bad one. Or you saw something on TV.

People leave small towns generally because there's no work -- the factory farms took over. But to someone who isn't working anyway and probably isn't going to be working any time soon, employment isn't the problem. Decent housing and food in a safe place for kids is the problem. Give families on assistance the option to move out of cities (with relocation assistance) but keep the same benefits and a lot will go. A lot won't. That's fine.
posted by pracowity at 5:19 AM on September 23, 2007

I have nothing but pity for the orphans who were taken away from any opportunity for a life of anything but mindless drudgery

So those kids were better off abandoned and homeless in New York than adopted by a Kansas family?!

I'm not in agreement with the plan to relocate entire families on social assistance to Kansas, though. Yes, certainly in some ways it would be better. Small towns are safer, healthier places to live than the inner city ghettoes, and the cost of living is lower. But, for one thing, the amount of social assistance given out is tied to costs of living for the area. People on social assistance in Kansas would receive much less than those in NYC, and so it's hardly to fair to give relocated families from NYC more. In some cases the NYC rates of social assistance would be higher than earned incomes in Kansas - and that's really going to create resentment.

Another consideration is that, statistically, most people on social assistance live in the suburbs and are on it for less than two years. It wouldn't be a good idea to move people who want to work to a place where there aren't any job or retraining opportunities.
posted by orange swan at 5:46 AM on September 23, 2007

I'm not in agreement with the plan to relocate entire families on social assistance to Kansas, though. Yes, certainly in some ways it would be better. Small towns are safer, healthier places to live than the inner city ghettoes, and the cost of living is lower. But, for one thing, the amount of social assistance given out is tied to costs of living for the area. People on social assistance in Kansas would receive much less than those in NYC, and so it's hardly to fair to give relocated families from NYC more. In some cases the NYC rates of social assistance would be higher than earned incomes in Kansas - and that's really going to create resentment.

I grew up in Shithole, IL, pop 6000. I don't live there anymore. According to the 2000 census, 16% of the town was already on welfare. Meth labs, Wal-Mart or fast food being the only employment options, a 30% high school drop out rate, rampant breeding of bastard children by 15 year olds - I'm not really seeing safer and healthier in this.
posted by pieoverdone at 7:14 AM on September 23, 2007

David Massengill's song "Riders on An Orphan Train.
posted by maurice at 8:00 AM on September 23, 2007

I have nothing but pity for the orphans who were taken away from any opportunity for a life of anything but mindless drudgery

...

Shithole, IL, pop 6000. I don't live there anymore. According to the 2000 census, 16% of the town was already on welfare. Meth labs, Wal-Mart or fast food being the only employment options, a 30% high school drop out rate, rampant breeding of bastard children by 15 year olds

Not all small towns are horrible. I grew up in Merritt, BC, Canada when the population was around 6000. It truly deserved the name "Shithole" at that time, for the same reasons listed above.

I moved to the city, spent 15 years there and realized how shitty it was for a wide variety of reasons, only some of which were the same ones that made Merritt suck. 4 years ago I found a nicer small town (Quesnel) and bought land and this year we moved to it. Sure, it has some issues still. There are drugs and crime. The native indian population is in a hell of a lot of trouble here. But the people are generally very nice, there are massive amounts of cultural and other activities to do, there is a lot of focus on things for kids to do. It's a little larger (27,000 in the whole extensive area) and a lot nicer.
posted by Kickstart70 at 9:52 AM on September 23, 2007

Things haven't changed much... they are still giving away free land in Kansas.
posted by Operation Afterglow at 9:57 AM on September 23, 2007

pracowity wrote "No, not all small towns are bad and not all residents of small towns are on drugs. Maybe you came from a bad one. Or you saw something on TV."

Strawmanning isn't cool. I never said that all residents of small towns were on drugs.

I said that the rate of drug use in small towns is higher than that of the cities, and that is factual. See this article in the NYT for a sampling. Or just google "small town drug use" and see for yourself. Small towns do, in fact, equal high rates of drug use.

I will accept, for the sake of argument, that some small towns aren't shitholes. I will not accept that the majority aren't shitholes.

Take, for example, the beautiful, tight knit, community of Tulia TX (just 45 minutes south of my location). It has a population of 5,000. Everyone knows everyone else, and knows what's happening in their lives. Tulia, you may recall, entered the national scene in 1999 when it arrested 46 people on charges of being drug dealers, the charges were later shown to be completely without merit and frudulent. Strangely out of the 46 people, 40 were black and the remaining 6 had close ties to the black community and lived in the "black" part of town.

In this town, where everyone knew everyone else, somehow the entire white population remained silent when nearly 1/2 of the black males in town were imprisoned on false charges.

But I'm sure Tulia and assorted shitholes filled with racist fuckwads would be a great place to forcably relocate welfare families. I mean, since small towns are so much better than the evil cities and all.

If small towns weren't shitholes they wouldn't be vanishing. People are voting with their feet and leaving in droves. Would people be fleeing to the cities if the small towns weren't awful?
posted by sotonohito at 10:38 AM on September 23, 2007

Not all small towns suck. I miss the small town where I spent my youth. Before it was subsumed as a bedroom community of the nearby state capital, it was a fabulous little town. An active Main Street with an ice cream parlor that had been there since the 1800's, a movie theater built in the 20s that had been meticulously maintained, fabulous old Victorian gingerbread houses, a newspaper that had been in operation since before the Depression, family owned grocery store, gas stations where someone came out and filled up your car and washed your windows...and pretty much everyone knew everyone.

There were hippies and baptists, pot smokers and teetotalers, Phds and farmers who hadn't finished high school. Granted, I was young, but I remember that place as a paradise.

Now, of course, it's been destroyed. Walmart killed Main Street, yuppies with their mcmansions killed everything else. But for more than 5 generations, the place was fabulous.
posted by Peecabu at 10:39 AM on September 23, 2007

And I apologize for the derail, the FPP and MsLyster's link to the previous thread are really great. Thanks.
posted by Peecabu at 10:41 AM on September 23, 2007

I grew up in Shithole, IL, pop 6000. I don't live there anymore. According to the 2000 census, 16% of the town was already on welfare. Meth labs, Wal-Mart or fast food being the only employment options, a 30% high school drop out rate, rampant breeding of bastard children by 15 year olds - I'm not really seeing safer and healthier in this.

How do those violent crime, welfare, high school drop out and teenage pregnancy rates compare with those in the inner city?

I tend to believe you're better off putting your kids in the only school in town where they mix with the full social spectrum than in an inner city school, and the same goes for all the other things you do in a small town.
posted by orange swan at 10:55 AM on September 23, 2007

I've lived in small towns and big cities, and I like the town I'm currently living in best.

Drugs and crime aren't issues except for a very few people. There was a murder a while back, but that was a domestic thing, not a random shooter. There's no Wal-Mart for a 60 mile radius, and even one of the local "bigger" towns an hour away (pop. 15,000) has both a Wal-Mart and a thriving downtown with cool shops that people actually go to.

For $350 a month on a 30 year fixed, you can own a reasonably sized home -- and that includes your property taxes and homeowner's insurance. Not much is open on Sunday, but on any other day, there's an organic food co-operative selling awesome stuff downtown and a thriving independent video game/CD/DVD store. If you want natural beauty, you can look up and see the Milky Way at night in the completely smogless, clear night, or you can drive out a little way to any of half a dozen lakes or rivers or wetlands.

There's also a municipal transportation system. It's not a bus, oh no. You call it. Then, for a dollar, it takes you wherever you want to go. Picks you up and drops you off at the door of wherever you might choose -- even if it's in the next town over.

The movie theater still only has one screen, but tickets are five bucks, and popcorn and a soda costs $2.50. I see more bumper stickers here for liberal candidates than I do "Support our Troops" ribbons. Kids here ride their bikes to the honest-to-god corner store, buy a dollar's worth of candy, and bike back home. Oh yeah, we've also got some great parks with nice places for kids to play, including 3 large swimming pools in a 20 minute radius, one with water slides.

All your ideas about small towns are just caused by having lived in the WRONG small towns. I was cynical like that for a long time, but I've since discovered that there are small enclaves of America that are like traveling back in time to a time we thought only existed in movies.
posted by InnocentBystander at 10:56 AM on September 23, 2007

Now, of course, it's been destroyed. Walmart killed Main Street, yuppies with their mcmansions killed everything else. But for more than 5 generations, the place was fabulous.

Sounds familiar.
posted by miss lynnster at 11:42 AM on September 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

I heart my small town. If 40k is small.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:54 PM on September 23, 2007

Awesome post amyms. Thank you!
posted by nickyskye at 5:15 AM on September 24, 2007

Thanks, amyms, for another great KS post. The orphan trains were really, really interesting. I seem to remember a conference where a woman presented a paper that was essentially a first-hand account by her grandmother who was on one of the trains... or was that on metafilter? It may have even been this person.
posted by sleepy pete at 8:59 AM on September 24, 2007

I am glad I grew up in a very small rural Midwestern town. But I am also really glad that I had enough sense to stay away from drugs and pregnancy and find creative things to do in the country. Most importantly, I really changed for the better once I explored cities, culture and international travel on top of my rural roots. I don't think I'd ever move back unless I wanted to raise kids. I appreciate what rural life taught me as a child and teenager, and could teach my potential children...but you better believe my kids would be exposed to life beyond the small town!
posted by RoadTripPlanner at 3:30 AM on September 25, 2007