the orphan trains

To all lovers of American Capitalism.

In the 1850's we put our little urchins on trains and moved 'em on out West,
where they might find a niche in a farm family, and go on to realize their
Great American Dream.
Today, we sell our children to Wall Street to be burdened with debt in hopes
of achieving an education and an open door to their Great American Dream.
This great Capitalist system of ours is actually the world's largest Ponzi
Scheme. A pyramid with a vast base, filled with squirming, struggling
bodies, and rising to a 1% peak, hopelessly far above our heads.
Is this really the best our highly civilized People can dream up? Or do we,
down here far below that lofty peak, do we simply believe that the majority
of human beings are so slothful and dull witted that they are only useful
for simple labor?
Has there ever been a time when this Great Nation of ours ever showed
respect for its poor? And yet, out of that massive pool has come some of
our greatest heroes.
And by the way, that story about the trains of hope, taking orphans to a new
life, that story is very sanitized. For many of those young lost Souls
there was a very Dark Side to this tale.

Carl Jarvis



----- Original Message -----
From: "joe harcz Comcast" <joeharcz@comcast.net>
To: "blind democracy List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 4:28 AM
Subject: the orphan trains


Orphan trains' brought thousands of children to Michigan from New York City
By Ann Zaniewski Detroit Free Press Staff Writer New York City's streets
were

a harsh world for children in the 1850s. Orphaned or just unwanted,
thousands of homeless kids scrounged for food and slept in alleys, often
becoming victims

of crime or falling ill with disease. Others stayed in dismal orphan
asylums. Orphan trains offered hope - a one-way ticket, perhaps, to a
brighter future.

Michigan played an important role in the Orphan Train Movement, a roughly
75-year period during which trains hauled thousands of children westward
from

crowded cities to more rural communities. But it's also a part of the
state's history that not many people know about, said Al Eicher, 78, of
Bloomfield

Hills. Eicher and his son, David Eicher, made a documentary about the orphan
trains and travel around the state speaking about events in Michigan
history.

Their next orphan train stop is Oct. 22 at the Clarkston Independence
District Library. When we did the research, none of the historical societies
in Michigan

had ever heard of it," Al Eicher said. A lot of people were very surprised
12,500 children were placed from the eastern states in Michigan. Researchers

say that in the mid-19th Century, there were at least 10,000 homeless
children in New York City, a problem buoyed by a large influx of European
immigrants.

Some children lost parents to disease or became homeless when their parents
could no longer afford to take care of them. These were kids that were
scraping

their living off the streets," said C. Warren Moses, archivist and retired
CEO of the New York Children's Aid Society. They would follow behind the
coal

trucks, picking up the loose coal, bagging it and selling it for food. Girls
sometimes fell into prostitution. In 1853, a man named Charles Loring Brace

founded the New York Children's Aid Society to help homeless and abandoned
children. His idea? Transport the kids west to live with new families in
burgeoning

farm communities, where he believed they would be much better off. The first
orphan train traveled from New York to Dowagiac, Mich., carrying nearly 50

children, Moses said. By the time the movement wound down in the late 1920s,
more than 40 Michigan towns and cities had received children. They include

Flint, Ann Arbor, Oxford, Pontiac, Ypsilanti, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and
Detroit. Philip Weitzel of Homer, near Albion, has the same name as his
great-grandfather,

an orphan train rider who landed in the Albion area and went on to serve in
the Civil War. They must have had a lot of courage," said Weitzel, 60. Prior

to boarding, children were bathed and given a new outfit, a change of
clothes and a card with their name to hand to their new families. Society
staff members

accompanied them on the train trip. In advance of each stop, the society
contacted local leaders, such as pastors or businessmen, whose job it was to
find

and screen families who might be suitable for a child. Posters plastered
around town advertised the train's arrival. The children were gathered at
the

train station, a local church or some other public place to meet their
potential new families. They felt their muscles. They examined their teeth,"
said

Shirley Gage Hodges, a genealogy and history lecturer from Albion. You can
imagine just how terrifying it would have been. They tried to keep brothers

and sisters together, but a lot of families couldn't take more than one
child. Kids who didn't get picked would get back on the train and move on to
another

town. The orphan train children provided much needed help on family farms,
though the people who took them had to promise to send them to school. The
aid

society periodically checked up on the children. If things weren't working
out, Moses said, the kids were free to leave anytime. Moses said Children's

Aid Society records show there were instances of orphan train children being
harshly disciplined, overworked and abused. But overall, the program was a

success, he said. The vast majority of cases, at least 90% of the
placements, were highly satisfactory," Moses said. Other agencies followed
the Children's

Aid Society and set up their own orphan train programs. Amanda Wahlmeier,
curator of the National Orphan Train Complex, estimates that there were
250,000

children involved in the orphan train movement, which lasted until 1929.
Others say the number is closer to 200,000. An estimated 12,500 ended up in
Michigan.

It was the largest migration of just children in the history of the world,
Wahlmeier said, but it often wasn't talked about much early on because of
the

stigma surrounding orphans and adoption. There are millions of orphan train
descendants - and, according to Moses, a renewed interest in the movement
from

people wanting to learn more about their past. It's a profoundly important
story," he said.







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy