Orphan Train

CBK: Though both of my parents are Southern, we moved to Maine when I was six years old and never looked back. I’m not naïve enough to consider myself a Mainer—though two of my younger sisters might be able to, having been born in-state (Mainers tend to be inconsistent on this subject)—but I did spend my formative years in Bangor, a mid-Maine town of thirty-five thousand on the Penobscot River. About a decade ago my parents retired to Bass Harbor, a tiny coastal village on Mount Desert Island. My three sisters have houses within two miles of my parents’ home, and one lives there with her family year-round. I am lucky enough to spend summers and other vacations on the island; my three boys consider it their homeland. For me, it’s as simple as this: Maine is a part of who I am.

RR: Can you talk about the presence of time in this book, the way you use it to define and expand?

CBK: The present-day story in Orphan Train unfolds over several months and the historical section spans twenty-three years, from 1929 to 1943. It took some time to figure out how to balance the sections so that they complemented and enhanced each other.

Too often, when I’m reading novels with separate storylines, I find that I prefer one over the other and am impatient to return to the one I like. I tried to avoid this with Orphan Train by weaving the stories together so that they contained echoes of, and references to, each other—for example, Vivian’s grandmother gives her a Claddagh necklace in one section, and then pages later Molly comments on the necklace in the present-day story. But I didn’t want the references to be too literal or overt. It was complicated! I also wanted the historical section to end abruptly with a surprising revelation (which I won’t give away here), and for the present-day story to pick up where it left off, laying bare the mechanics of the storytelling: that Vivian is telling Molly her story in the present day. Sometimes I gave myself a headache trying to figure out how it all fit together. More than once, my editor, thank goodness, came in and saved the day.

A Short History of the Real Orphan Trains

ORPHAN TRAIN is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known but historically significant moment in our country’s past. Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children—many of whom, like the character in this book, were first-generation Irish Catholic immigrants—from the coastal cities of the eastern United States to the Midwest for “adoption,” which often turned out to be indentured servitude. Charles Loring Brace, who founded the program, believed that hard work, education, and firm but compassionate childrearing—not to mention midwestern Christian family values—were the only way to save these children from a life of depravity and poverty. Until the 1930s, there was no social safety net; it is estimated that more than ten thousand children were living on the streets of New York City at any given time.

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, Lewis Wickes Hines Collection of the National Child Labor Committee.

Elizabeth Street in New York City, where Niamh lived, in the early twentieth century.

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, Lewis Wickes Hines Collection of the National Child Labor Committee.

A bootblack like Dutchy, near City Hall Park, New York City, 1924.

Photograph courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society Archive, New York City.

A group of early-twentieth-century orphan-train riders with their chaperones.

Photograph courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society Archive, New York City.

Notices like this one were posted in the days and weeks before a train arrived in town.

Many of the children had experienced great trauma in their short lives and they had no idea where there were going. The train would pull into a station and the local townspeople would assemble to inspect them—often literally scrutinizing teeth, eyes, and limbs to determine whether a child was sturdy enough for field work, or intelligent and mild-tempered enough to cook and clean. Babies and healthy older boys were typically chosen first; older girls were chosen last. After a brief trial period, the children became indentured to their host families. If a child wasn’t chosen, he or she would get back on the train to try again at the next town.

Photograph courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society Archive, New York City.

A rare photograph of an entire trainful of children on its way to Kansas.

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, Lewis Wickes Hines Collection of the National Child Labor Committee.

A young girl like Niamh/Dorothy, sewing to earn money.

Some children were warmly welcomed by new families and towns. Others were beaten, mistreated, taunted, or ignored. They lost any sense of their cultural identities and backgrounds; siblings were often separated, and contact between them was discouraged. City children were expected to perform hard farm labor for which they were neither emotionally nor physically prepared. Many of them were first-generation immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Ireland and were teased for their strange accents; some barely spoke English. Jealousy and competition in the new families created rifts, and many children ended up feeling that they didn’t belong anywhere. Some drifted from home to home to find someone who wanted them. Many ran away. The Children’s Aid Society did attempt to keep track of these children, but the reality of great distances and spotty record keeping made this difficult.

Many train riders never spoke about their early lives. But as the years passed, some train riders and their descendants began to demand that they be allowed access to records that until that time had been closed to them. One train rider I spoke with, ninety-four-year-old Pat Thiessen, told me that when, in her fifties, she finally got her birth certificate with her parents’ names on it, she shouted with joy. “I was so happy to know about myself, just a little,” she said. “It [still] feels incomplete. I keep wondering: What were my grandparents like? What did they have in my family that I could’ve enjoyed? Who would I be? I think of all of these things, you know. I had a good home; I don’t mean that. But I always felt they were not my people. And they weren’t.”

Photograph courtesy of the Thiessen family.

Train rider Pat Thiessen in 1920, dressed up for her first Easter with her new family in Mi