Ride to Nebraska Ended in Hardship

Orphan train rider Marguerite Driscoll would be in her 80s and a great-grandmother before she recognized the significance of her journey from New York City to Bertrand, Neb., in 1911.

“She was 5 when she rode the train and she remembered it,” said one of her daughters, Jo Ann Espinoza of Lakeside. “A big toe was caught in a door and smashed .... Oh, she was really scared. But she was with an older girl and a younger one from the same orphanage.”

Along the way, children would get off the train at various stops and be touched and examined by strangers deciding whether to take them into their homes. “It was like inspecting cattle or something,” said Espinoza, whose mother died last year at the age of 93, one of a handful of orphan train riders who eventually settled in California.

Abandoned at birth in a foundling hospital by her unwed mother, young Marguerite was spared the cattle call because she was “tagged”--already claimed by a couple that had ordered her up, as if from a catalog, to help on their farm, Espinoza said. With three sons and plenty of housework, the Catholic family had requested a girl with dark hair and blue eyes who was born into their faith. They got Marguerite, who would technically remain a charge of the New York Foundling Hospital, according to her daughter, because her foster parents never legally adopted her.

She was treated more like an indentured servant than a daughter, Espinoza said. Though she milked the cows and delivered milk to customers of the farm, she was not permitted to drink it herself. She lost most of her teeth by 16, apparently from lack of calcium and other nutrition. She was only allowed one helping of food at meals. “She could not remember a time when she wasn’t hungry,” Espinoza said. “She was smacked in the mouth until she lost her New York accent.”

Marguerite was a good dancer who, “for some reason, always wanted to be a dancer or a trapeze performer,” her daughter said. She ran away at 16 to join a circus but her foster mother sent the sheriff after her and put her in a convent once she returned. Sympathetic neighbors contacted the foundling home in New York, which finally intervened and got her out after two more years.

She married a local boy, David Wesley Ek, who left her a few months after the birth of Jo Ann, their third child. Marguerite Ek moved her son and two daughters from Nebraska to Wyoming, Colorado and finally, toward the end of World War II, to San Diego. She worked as a seamstress, a housekeeper, a washerwoman. “We struggled. But, by golly, she kept us together,” Espinoza said. “She was not about to let her kids go.”

Pieces of Marguerite’s childhood trickled out as she raised her children, Espinoza said, but she never thought of her personal misery as having any sort of historical connection. Then, someone wrote to her about an orphan train riders’ reunion “and everything started coming out.”

By now a widow--she’d remarried at 70--Marguerite Thomson spent hours writing her story in a sprawling hand for a series published by the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, based in Springdale, Ark. With the help of her children and grandchildren, she began aggressively tracing her origins and corresponding with aged cousins. She even traveled back to New York, though her contact there, a cousin, died before they could meet. She had finally learned the names of her mother and father--Delia Driscoll and Jeremiah Fives--and believed her father was a priest.

The greatest sorrow in her life was never meeting her mother, Espinoza said. “If we could’ve given Mom anything, my sister and I would’ve given her that.”