[Music] Throughout the city of Concordia, Kansas, are spread statues of children.

But these are not merely cheerful decorations.

Each represents a child who traveled west on the orphan trains with the hope of finding a home.

[Music] Orphan trains were in a way kind of unique, but there would be trainloads of orphans usually coming from the eastern third of the United States.

And they'd take them along the railroad and a lot of them came to Kansas.

In fact, many, many did.

Kansas and Nebraska.

They lasted up until probably almost the 1920s.

But in Concordia, there is a national orphan train complex.

Well, hello there.

I'm Heather Bigwood.

I'm the curator of the National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center here in Concordia, Kansas.

We strive to remember and tell the stories of orphan train riders from 1854 to 1929.

That's a full 75 years in American history.

We like to keep as many records on orphan train riders as possible.

We get an average of about a new record every week.

It kind of varies from that, but keeping the records is part of the story, is part of preserving the story of the orphan train movement.

My name is Lori Halfhide.

I'm the head researcher here at the National Orphan Train Complex.

Genealogy isn't something everybody can do.

And a lot of people don't know how to find out if their ancestor was an orphan train rider or how to find out what organization sent them out.

So I do research requests for people.

We have around 8,000 files.

Either people have donated the information to us or that we have found on our own.

As the head researcher, I find so many stories to share.

Some are wonderful, some not so wonderful.

One of the riders that we get the most inquiries about is one who never even had a descendant.

His name was Father Paul Fangman.

He was a priest in Nebraska.

He was nine months old when he was sent to the Fangmans in Rayville, Nebraska.

He decided he wanted to be a man of the cloth.

And his first Mass was at his home church.

They called him everyone's priest because it didn't matter if you were Catholic.

He would listen to anyone.

He would counsel anyone.

He was a very smart man.

His parishioners loved him so much.

There is a statue of him at our Catholic church.

And we have people coming in all the time wanting to know where Father Paul's statue is.

They want to go see it.

These statues are representational of children.

They are not an exact likeness of the children.

We picked this little boy for Father Paul because he looked ornery.

He had his hat on backwards and he had a frog in his hand and a bucket.

So we thought he looked ornery.

But he was a silly guy.

The first time I met him, we were at an orphan train reunion in Madison, Nebraska.

And here's this little 80-year-old priest with these little teenage girls.

And they're all doing cartwheels out on a basketball gymnasium floor.

And he said, "What are you guys doing?"

And they said, "Well, we're doing cartwheels."

And he goes, "Teach me how?"

And there's a little 80-year-old man doing cartwheels with these.... We were all holding our breath because we thought he was going to break a hip.

But he was a great guy.

He came to a reunion here too.

So all of the statues of the children are representational.

There's a reason why we pick all of them, whether it's a hobby or something related to the rider or the person the statue is dedicated for.

The orphan train movement started with a man called Charles Loring Brace.

Now he was a young Protestant minister with a heart for people.

And so he started doing a lot of relief work with the poor, especially in New York City in Five Points, which was the biggest, baddest, worst part of New York, the most dangerous.

He really noticed and had a heart for the children.

The children were suffering in the mid-19th century.

The police chief estimated there was about 10,000 homeless children roaming around on the streets.

That was a conservative never according to philanthropists of the time.

And so it could have been, they estimated up to about 30,000.

Why there were so many children, there's several different reasons why.

One was because of the Industrial Revolution.

It started moving people from the farming communities into the cities.

Also immigration started to increase from the mid-19th century onward.

Also we had several epidemics throughout the United States.

Cholera was a major one.

Tuberculosis spread rapidly in small crowded tenement houses that left a lot of children without any parents, without anyone to care for them.

Charles Loring Brace wanted to have a vision.

Well he first started with the news boys and so he created a lodging house for the boys to come.

They could pay a few cents at a time, get a good meal, a bath.

And from that grew the Orphan Train movement.

He thought if he could get children out of the city into family homes on the farms, he thought that that would be the best and most wholesome upbringing for the children.

And in addition because of the farms they didn't have to worry where the food was coming from.

And nutrition was a huge problem in the cities.

Ernest Godfrey Schmidt is one of my favorite orphan train riders.

He was born in New York.

He was the youngest child of Godfrey and Filipina.

There was Anna, Bertha, Carl, Clara, and Ernest.

Clara and Ernest wound up with Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Stotler in Iowa.

And it was a wonderful home.

They were an older couple who had never been blessed with children of their own.

Ernest attended high school and graduated.

He went on to college and Mr. Stotler got his friend who was a congressman to get Ernest into West Point.

So he went to West Point for four years.

He played on the football team.

He was a wrestler.

He was in chorus.

He did everything.

Ernest married his sweetheart in 1927.

They had a daughter the next year.

He joined the Army Air Corps which was an elite group.

And Ernest was on a mission.

They were flying an airplane from Langley Air Force Base down to Mexico.

They got to Alabama and the plane developed engine issues.

So all four of the men who were on board parachuted out.

Ernest was first out of the plane.

The other three followed him.

And the other three landed safely.

Ernest's parachute did not deploy.

And he was killed on impact.

He was only 26 years old and had about a three-month-old daughter.

He didn't live nearly long enough.

But he had such a wonderful life while he was here.

Now the Children's Aid Society did placements a certain way.

And yes, they did improve on their placement methods throughout the different decades where they operated.

The public had to apply.

For the children, the local agent would go through the local committee who would know who the different people were who were submitting those applications.

They'd be judges.

They'd be mayors.

They'd be bankers.

They'd be the grocers.

They'd be the people of the eyes of the community.

And so that they could guarantee a much better placement, safer placement for the children.

The children would travel from New York on different trains.

They would hold distribution meetings or placement meetings.

They would introduce the children.

They would tell about the Children's Aid Society's mission and what they're trying to accomplish and what they expected of the different families.

Now the agent would come and check on the children up to four times a year in the first year and at least once a year every year after until they were 18.

The way that the Children's Aid Society put into place, it really was the basis of the modern foster care system today on vetting people, on applying and upon checking in on the children.

It wasn't a perfect system.

There were still some very unhappy tragedies but generally it was a completely new a new way how to place children in families.

Now Charles Loring Brace, it was very important to him that the children were not looked down on and so they would have two different outfits of clothes coming with them.

They would be new most of the time.

They'd have a traveling outfit and then they'd have a meet the public... a nice outfit.

It was important to Charles Loring Brace that the children were were not looked down on because orphans often were.

If you had no mother or father you were looked at you didn't have any morals, you didn't have any, you weren't worth very much and he wanted to change that perception about children.

Anna Fuchs was an orphan train rider to McPherson, Kansas.

She came in 1924 right before Christmas with her two sisters.

She was the oldest.

Their parents had both died of tuberculosis.

Anna was sure she was not going to get picked because she had a limp and her hand was not right.

She had a missing finger.

It was a birth defect and she was just sure that no one would want her.

Well in the crowd there was a lady who had come late to the placement.

Her name was Jenny Bengston.

She was in her 40s and had never married and she met Anna's eyes and she saw in her face the same sadness she had felt when her mother had passed away.

So she went and talked to Anna Laura Hill and the local committee and asked if she could take Anna home with her and they said sure.

And Anna and Jenny lived together until Jenny passed.

Anna, she taught Anna to play piano, play the organ beautifully.

She played the violin.

She painted China.

I mean she didn't let her handicap stop her.

An important thing of the Children's Day Society is that it wasn't just for work.

Sometimes the orphan train movement was portrayed as that way but Charles Loring Brace, his vision was that these children would be actually part of the family.

That they yes would be expected to work alongside the rest of the family but they were also expected to enjoy the fruits of their labor along with the rest of the family.

They were required to be taken to church with the family and to go to Sunday school to be fed and clothed just like any other member of their family.

The Panzer brothers had a sad beginning.

They all kept their own names.

They swore on the train that they wouldn't change their name and they wouldn't let anybody adopt them because they were the Panzer brothers.

The oldest son Edward was the only one who didn't have a good placement.

He was placed in a home where the guy made him work all the time and he sat and watched.

He was not a nice guy.

He gave him one pair of overalls, one pair of boots and a pig and that was it.

And Ed wanted to make something of himself.

He wanted to go to school.

He wanted to become a doctor because he had had appendicitis at the orphanage and he decided since that doctor had saved his life he wanted to be a doctor.

So he went to a gathering they had in town.

They said that if you wanted to come to college, if you wanted an education, to come to the Baptist College and you could get an education there.

So he sold his pig, got a new suit of clothes, hopped on a freight car and went to the town where the college was.

His clothes got stolen.

He wound up with just a dollar or so and he found out where the president of the college lived and he went and knocked on his door and he said I want an education, and he said how much money you got, and he said I get a dollar in some odd cents and he says that's how much tuition is this year and he got to go to school.

Brother Harold also became a doctor.

He was placed in a good home and his parents sent him to college.

He built a hospital out in western Nebraska and his brother Jack who was a hospital administrator came in and administrated the hospital for him and their statute Harold and Ed are both at the hospital together and then they had a brother Robert and he became a Methodist minister and when his youngest brother got married he did the ceremony and the other three brothers stood up for him.

So they remained very close and Robert's statue is up by the Methodist Church.

Now this is Anna Laura Hill and she has a wonderful story.

Anna Laura Hill, she was the first female placement agent for the Children's Aid Society.

Some of the kids called her a big woman with a big hat.

She didn't let anybody mess around with her kids.

She worked hard, strived to make sure that brothers and sisters stayed in the same communities.

If she couldn't find them all at home in the same community, she made sure that they had contact information so that they could at least write to each other.

She refused, flatly refused to separate twins.

She checked on her kids once a year.

She took her camera with her.

She wrote to them.

They wrote to her.

She's got cards and letters and she was a wonderful lady.

There was also another organization, the second largest.

It's the New York Foundling Hospital and that started placing children on orphan trains in 1873 and this is sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon and she was a sister of charity.

She noticed how many babies were being left abandoned on the streets of New York.

She decided to focus on children from birth to about age three.

They did help children over that but that was her main focus.

This was the first home of the New York Foundling Hospital in New York City.

It was just a brownstone, a place to have the children.

Eventually it grew out into this large building here.

Now because of the children, because there were so many and it wasn't right to keep children just in a big large facility, they wanted to do something better and so they decided to start sending children on what we now know as orphan trains and that was in 1873 when they first sent their train.

Now the way that the New York Foundling Hospital sent trains was different than the Children's Aid Society.

They had families approach them first.

So if you were interested, if you were a family, you wanted a little child, you would contact your local priest and then that priest would contact the New York Foundling Hospital and the New York Foundling Hospital would send children out.

So there was a story in 1911 that was in the newspaper and it talked about how they were dropping children off all the way from New York City down through Illinois and Arkansas, Louisiana, over to Texas and then eventually they would end up into the state of Washington.

That whole trip would last three weeks for the children.

Now the children they would have at the New York Foundling Hospital, they would have tags sewn into their clothes so that they made sure and know the child was going to the right family.

They often would have numbers that they would have.

The little girls would have tags sewn into the hem of their dresses on the inside and the boys into the back of their shirt collars.

The tag as you can see it has the number 19 on it.

That would have been little girl Winifred.

That was her number so her family would have got the number 19 in order to accept her and the priest, local priest of the area was Reverend W. Shelberg and so it was in Hanover, Kansas where they were sent.

So it had the priest's name, it had the location, it had the little girl's name, the child's name and then their birth date.

We're standing in the Jones Education Station.

It's where we house our passenger car.

This car was from Chingawasa Springs.

There were two of them and they took people out to the Springs.

In 1896, this was by Marion, Kansas.

In 1896 there was a panic and the Springs went under and so these cars were donated to the city of Marion.

One of them became the Owl Car Cafe which served the greasiest burgers in Marion and this one became a doctor's office.

It was a dental office for Dr. Cece Jones and just in the last nine years we have discovered that Dr. Cece Jones was an area placement agent for the Children's Aid Society and he and his wife took in an orphan train rider.

Her name was Mabel Jones so she didn't even have to change her name and she had been a rider to Great Bend and didn't have a good placement.

So Mr. Jones was called to come and get her and find her a new placement.

Well he just took her home.

This was Mabel's playhouse because he had retired.

So this was her playhouse and then after she got married this was her chicken coop.

They drug it out to her farm and this was her chicken coop.

So this little car that we got free from the city of Marion had such a colorful orphan train history that we had no idea of until I sat down and started going through newspapers.

I get a lot of questions on why here.

Why is the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas?

One of the reasons is because of this lady here Mary Ellen Johnson and so back in 1986 she was doing a research project and came across orphan train riders and she had never heard of the orphan train movement at all and so she became instrumental in forming the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America and that was an organization that brought orphan train riders all over the United States together.

Well she kept records, she had held reunions.

Mary Ellen Johnson she wasn't a spring chicken when when she did start in 1986 and so after almost 30 years she began looking for locations where she would donate her files her records that she had gathered on the orphan train movement.

Meanwhile here in Concordia, Kansas we had a speaker speaking about the orphan trains in the Cook series offered at the Cook Theater in the Cloud County Community College and that inspired local citizens here to form a board and a dream for a museum for the orphan train movement and so meanwhile we heard about Mary Ellen Johnson and she was looking for a place to have her records.

We already had this 1917 historic depot donated to us by Beth Cauldron and we just were blessed to get those records and so that's what has grown out of them.

This picture here is when we opened in September of 2007 and so Mary Ellen Johnson is here along with several of our board members here but we also have orphan train riders so it was wonderful to have so many people come.

Now we don't know of any orphan train riders who are alive today.

The last one that we know of passed away in June of 2021 and so it's so important for us to be able to continue to tell their stories even though they're not alive anymore.

We found that so many people had never even heard of the orphan train movement so many people that come into our museum don't know what the orphan train is and so they come out of curiosity.

When Mary Ellen Johnson started the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America at that time they had no idea the extent of the numbers that were involved in the orphan train movement and so they had maybe a hundred thousand about in the 1980s that was the estimate but now since then the newest estimate is around 250,000 children being sent west on the orphan trains.

Orphans were were looked down upon and because of that a lot of people didn't want to let other people know that they were that they rode on the orphan train that they were an orphan train rider that they were an orphan.

They were looked down as having no morals if you don't have a mother and father you had a bad beginning and so because of that a lot of people didn't talk about this, but because of Mary Ellen Johnson and the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America it really gave a voice to a place a safe place for the orphan train riders to talk about their experiences to get together to meet and so that they can know that I wasn't the only one.

As we can hear the train in the background we are located near an active railroad track but here's the picture of the only known official picture of an orphan train train and so you can see that there are two agents we have identified them one is Anna Laura Hill.

They had agent for the state of Kansas and there's also children at the back of the train so it was taken in 1908 in Blue Rapids, Kansas.

One thing I like to tell people about the National Orphan Train Complex here our museum and research center I like to tell them that this is a museum of stories.

Yes we have some artifacts yes there are some things but we like to tell the stories we like to represent the orphan train riders the history the movement when we talk about the orphan train movement we really are talking about our country we're talking about Americans and understanding that history understanding of of how we as Americans took care of our children took care of our needy ones that really tells us who we are as a country so we hope that you come and visit us here in Concordia, Kansas and learn more about what makes us American.

[MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]