Orphan trains delivered children in late 1800s

Twice in 1889 and once again in 1900, the orphan train came through and stopped in Mt. Pleasant to drop off kids from the east coast in need of a new home. Historian and retired Canadian Pacific Railroad conductor Dennis Wilson spoke on the topic Tuesday at the Friends of the Harlan-Lincoln House Brown Bag Lecture.

Wilson opened the lecture with a thought-provoking scenario.

'I'm going to bring this up, so don't take it seriously,” he said. 'Did you see the headlines the other day in the Southeast Union Journal newspaper that there's a busload of kids, about 42 kids, coming out of Chicago tomorrow. About 20 percent are orphans, and the others are abused, unwanted kids that live in the street. They range in ages of four to about 13, and they're coming to Mt. Pleasant down to Faith Lutheran Church. Around 2 o'clock, they're going to line them up, and you can pick out the one you want. You want someone to help your lady out in the kitchen or someone to help you out in the field, pick one up or maybe you can get two. The neat thing about this is if they don't work out for you, you can send them back.”

'Now you're sitting there thinking you can't do that,” Wilson said. 'But they did it from 1854 to 1929 for 75 years. You don't see it in history books, you don't read a bylaw, but they did do it.”

Wilson explained that orphan trains were a way to move children by force throughout the country in order to deal with the overpopulation in primarily New York. Between the different agencies that were in charge of the orphan trains, over 300,000 children were shipped via the railroads.

'The first time I heard about orphan trains, I was in sixth grade at country school at Danville Township,” Wilson said. 'There was an orphan writer coming to our school to tell us about her experiences. Her name was Helen, and she told us about growing up in an orphanage, getting put on a train with a group of kids, traveling from Chicago to Minneapolis, and ending up with an older couple that seemed worrisome but were still able to take her.”

Wilson's interest in Helen's story and the unspoken history of the orphan trains was brought up once more during his research for his railroad lifelong learning program.

'Going through that research for almost every community I looked at, it mentioned children coming by train,” he said. 'For the past 10 years, I've been researching and finding out something new all the time. There's a lot there, and I want to get the facts out because there's a lot of misunderstanding on it.”

The next Friends of the Harlan-Lincoln House Brown Bag lecture will take place March 23 from noon to 1 p.m. Iowa Historian and author William Sherman will talk about how Iowa became the country school capital of America, and Henry County Historic Preservation Commission will discuss its own research on the country schools in Henry County. For more information or to reserve your seat, visit iw.edu/friends-of-the-harlan-lincoln-house-brown-bag-lecture-series/.