Orphan Trains Transported Some to New Lives, Others Into a Nightmare of Abuse

Time hasn’t faded 77-year-old Harold Williams’ memory of leaving New York City along with other orphans on a train taking them to new homes in the Midwest.

“I remember standing on the platform and then going into the train and sitting down with my teddy bear in my lap,” he said. “I recall looking out the window and seeing all the people and the buildings.”

Many orphaned or abandoned children benefited from the Orphan Train Movement, which lasted from 1854 to 1929. Others merely had their suffering relocated.

Their tales, good and bad, were told at an Orphan Train reunion attended by about two dozen people who took part in the unusual social experiment that sent more than 100,000 children to foster homes far from the big city.

“In 1929, me and my twin brother were put on the last orphan train out to Kansas,” said Alan Bankston, 64, of Dayton, Ohio.

“We wound up with adoptive parents,” he said. “They gave us everything we needed, except love. And love is what we needed the most.”

Bankston wept during part of his talk. He said although he and his wife had six children, they took in two foster children “because I knew how important it was to have someone love you.”

The Orphan Train came at a time when New York City was inundated by European immigrants who crowded tenements on the Lower East Side. Poverty and disease were rampant. Many children were orphaned or left to fend for themselves on the streets.

Arthur Smith, 72, of Trenton, N.J., was only 49 days old when a well-dressed woman left him in a wicker basket in Gimbel’s department store. When he was 4 years old, he boarded a train for a new life on an Iowa farm.

Smith said he was lucky to be taken in by a loving family, but he admitted that the mystery of the woman who left him behind haunted him.

“Then I sort of put it aside,” he said. “I decided it was a door I wasn’t meant to open. I don’t feel bad about my mother. I assume she was in circumstances beyond her control.”

Williams, of Magalia, Calif., said he is still angry at his mother. “I was a cute little baby, only 16 days old,” he said. “How could she dump me?”

He said he spent most of his childhood with “an old lady who was a tyrant and her five daughters.”

“I was scared to death of her,” Williams said. “If I became sick, I got beaten. She had this theory that if you got sick, you’d done something bad.”

Williams left that home at 17, after years of being “abused mentally, physically and sexually.”

He became a homeless alcoholic but pulled his life together with the help of a job at a dairy plant. He later became plant manager and got married.

Seventy-one-year-old Winifred Williams, no relation, of Temple Hills, Md., looked at her husband, Lawrence, while she spoke to the group.

“To be an orphan means to survive,” she said. “You don’t have a parent or a mother to love you. You tell yourself you will survive until you find someone who will love you.