Orphan Trains delivered children from NYC

By Jamie Anfenson-Comeau

jamieenews@bellsouth.net

It’s a part of history that few people talk about - hundreds of thousands of children, taken off the streets of New York, loaded onto trains, and shipped across the country to be given away to whoever wanted them.

It’s the horrors and happy endings of their stories that Alison Moore and her husband Phil Lancaster sought to bring to life Monday at LSU at Eunice with their multimedia presentation, “At Rail’s End, Their Stories Begin: History of the Orphan Train Riders”.

Through music, interviews, slide shows and fiction, Lancaster and Moore shed some light on the hidden story of a quarter of a million children who, between 1854 and 1929, were taken from orphanages, foundling homes and off the streets and shipped to communities in the South and developing Midwest.

These “Orphan Trains”, as they came to be known, were the brainchild of the Rev. Charles Loring Brace, who sought to find better homes for the unwanted children of New York in a time when there was no such thing as the Department of Social Services.

It speaks of the best and the worst in the human soul; many of the children were adopted into loving families; many others were forced into lives of virtual servitude.

Moore and Lancaster have been collecting and sharing these stories for the past 10 years.

“We have had the opportunity to meet many people whose lives were changed when they got off the train and were chosen,” Lancaster said, adding, “sometimes there’s not what we would call a happy ending, but they’re all part of the tapestry of our history.”

Moore said that siblings were often separated, and children were forced to leave behind all contact with their former families.

Moore said that many people walked away from their past and never looked back. “There was so much shame connected with being an orphan from New York in a small town in Louisiana.”

Others spent their lives trying to find what had been lost.

The approximately 2,000 children brought to the Acadiana region often faced the additional hurdle of a language barrier, as English-speaking children were taken in by families that spoke nothing but French.

At the end of the presentation, descendants of Orphan Train riders were given a chance to tell their families’ stories.

John LeDoux spoke of his father, Ernest LeDoux, who was adopted in Eunice. His father’s adoptive brother, Arnold LeDoux, donated the land that LSUE was built on.

“He was a good, good man. He led a good life here,” LeDoux said of his father.

“The only thing we know, is we have a note from the doctor that delivered him, and his mother’s name was Sarah Kaplan, so his (birth) name was Ernest Kaplan and he was probably of Jewish descent.”

For more information on the Orphan Train experience, visit the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America on the web at www.orphantrainriders.com.