What were these children like, these waifs who hustled New York City streets or lived in squalid orphanages with names like Home for the Friendless? What was it like to have been one of the more than 100,000 urban ragamuffins scooped up, put on trains and shipped to strange new lives on Midwestern farms [in] an exceedingly ambitious child-aid operation, the Orphan Trains. Starting in 1854 and continuing for the next 75 years, the Children's Aid Society, later joined by other agencies, took whole trainloads of children from vermin-infested city slums to new tomorrows in the heartland. The first participants and the majority of those to come later were from New York.Once arrived, they were lined up to be picked over by townspeople. Younger ones were adopted by families; older ones taken in and educated in return for work, and the unchosen shipped to the next town. One historian observed that not since the Children's Crusade in the 13th century had there been such a movement of children over such vast distances.
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