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[Orphan Trains and their Precious Cargo]

From the Wisconsin State Journal, July 27, 2001
by William Wineke

(some excerpts) MILTON - This is one of the ways society cared for its poor children a century ago:

Orphan trains carried unwanted children - not all of them orphans at all - from the big cities of the East to the Midwest, where they were put on display and, if lucky, taken into the homes of rural residents. Clark Kidder, a Milton historian and farmer whose grandmother, Emily Reese Kidder, came to the Midwest on one of those trains, has conducted a study of the trains and of the way the children were treated when they got to these parts.

Orphan trains transported an estimated 250,000 children, most of them from New York, to the Midwest between 1854 and 1929.

Kidder now operates a game farm, where he allows hunters to shoot pheasants, and a roadside vegetable stand on the family farm.In his spare time, however, he is an amateur historian and is author of a just-published book, "Orphan Trains and their Precious Cargo" (Heritage Books: $24.95).

The book is, essentially, a publication of the journals of the Rev. Herman Clarke, who worked with the Children's Aid Society of New York and made 32 trips to the Midwest to place hundreds of children with foster families between 1898 and 1907. Most of the children went to Missouri, Kansas and Indiana. But, Kidder learned, "in the 1870s, the orphan trains stopped in Stoughton, Sparta and Janesville."

In the 1880s, the Wisconsin Legislature put a stop to such placements "because one legislator said he didn't want any more New York criminal children brought into Wisconsin," Kidder said in a recent interview at his game farm. Single placements were allowed, however, which is why Emily Reese finally arrived here.

Life in rural Wisconsin in the early days of this century was not completely idyllic, Kidder said.

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