In this post I mentioned my recent field trip to the Lanesfield School, circa 1904. I wondered how “our kids” would have fared in that strict, unyielding environment. I also wondered how many of “our kids” even existed in that day and age. I mentioned how integrated families were back then, by necessity… and how even though parents might have been too busy surviving to be very nurturing, family members were rarely separated and the essential ingredients for good attachments to form were usually present.


In the article I wrote about disruption, I mentioned the Orphan Trains. Kansas was at the heart of the Orphan Train era and it is possible to find books and letters in museums in this area that tell stories of train riders and their new lives in the west.


Interestingly enough, the recent issue of Fostering Families Today magazine mentions the Orphan Trains in an article describing the evolution of child welfare policy. The article states that in 1854, a minister with the New York Children’s Aid Society developed the plan to place some of New York’s 34,000 homeless kids on trains and send them south and west. The program continued until 1929 and “placed out” over 106,000 kids. Therefore, it is certainly possible that one or more of these Orphan Train riders attended schools in Kansas similar to the one we visited last week.


Do you think any of those homeless New York kids had RAD? I do! I mentioned in my article about disruption the possible outcomes I envisioned when a train-riding child disembarked at each stop on his or her way out west…


Families looking for another field hand might pick children based on “workability”. Perhaps a bond would form with this child, perhaps not. Families looking for a bona fide family member would have different criteria in mind for choosing their child. Would they pick the most charming child? (Oops, that might be a mistake!) Or the one hiding behind the skirt of some adult agent/chaperone who accompanied the children?


What about the kids? Children who had perhaps had enough of a decent start in life that they were able to form attachments would be able to transfer that attachment to a new family, if that intimacy were welcomed and encouraged. If not, such children would survive, perhaps not easily or happily, but still they would presumably be fed and clothed until adulthood.


Children who were so emotionally damaged by life as an abused, neglected or homeless child in mid-1800’s New York that they were not able to form attachments probably made pretty good farm hands. No intimacy expected… no intimacy offered. No work probably meant no food… so it would be in the child’s best interest to work! One article said some of the children were "difficult, incorrigible, and delinquent" and mentioned that Billy the Kid was an Orphan Train rider. Imagine that!!!


And, like now, children who were not willing or able to respond to a demand for intimacy probably didn’t fit well into families who wanted love and reciprocity. It is those kids I wondered about when I was sitting in the Lanesfield school desk and thinking about how school operated in those days. There are too many variables and too many things different back then to really know how that played out… but it did make me wonder!


Check this out for more information about Orphan Trains in Kansas. or this article.

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