At first, it seems like a social development, a need, and solution to help with the requirements of the country. With too many people over here, so they are relocated over there. Sounds simple and practical. And that’s what I initially thought when I learnt of the orphan train movement in the US. I’ve already written a couple of articles around it – Just Passing Through and A Train of Thought, looking at some stats and other possible suggestions around it.
But when asked if I knew anything about Detroit specifically or about it crossing into Canada, I thought I would revisit the subject. And on first glance at the geographical areas involved, it just looks like a very easy route for these ‘relocations’ that went on. Trafficking them in plain sight. An older, more public version of what we hear of today, where it is not so public, of shipping containers and elaborate networks treating them as A Commodity. Just as they did before, but eventually people start asking questions, or noticing. So it goes underground. Literally.
I can’t help thinking, though, that the stat of 50,000 babies going missing in Ireland at end of 1700’s could be part of it, discussed in A Rather Dark Enterprise. Marked as died, but with no evidence of it, and at first, I assumed it to be true. Why would anyone lie in the records about babies perishing? Unless perhaps, they were taken and relocated. And with the Irish famine issue forcing many over there as well, it wouldn’t seem so odd that many have Irish roots, just perhaps some of them are even darker than they are told. And with many records of that time lost or deliberately destroyed, some will never know.
The numbers vary in the records, they say 200,000 orphans were taken by train all over the American mid-west, in some articles, they say up to 250,000. That’s a big variation, and makes you wonder if they just struggled with accuracy, or as with today, fabrication of numbers up or down can be of benefit to someone. I saw an article the other day about a couple of brothers who ran an orphanage, and it turned out that they were lying about their placements, stealing the money, keeping children in basements and this wasn’t discovered for quite some time. That’s just one case, affecting dozens of children. But really, the whole thing is completely unsavoury to me, and reads like a precursor to the setup we have today.
Of creating orphans to then ‘help’ by having orphanages, stigmatising single parenthood and restricting people’s ability to feed their family so they can deem them unfit and then take their children into ‘care’. And then ship them off to be sold/purchased in an auction style affair. Where people would gather in towns to bid on whatever they were looking for. A new child for the family, a new labourer or maid. Because they wanted workers and fodder for their schemes, and needed a way or a cover to obtain them and to freely move them around. So, this weird social scheme ran from the 1850’s through to 1929. That’s quite a substantial time to be having such a shortage of labour that you need to keep procuring children. At the same time, we are told that millions of people were relocating to the US, and Canada. Surely, they were having children? But why was it they needed children anyway? Millions of adults were there, constantly breeding. We are also told that millions of slaves were there by this time, also there to be workers and breeding the next generations.
Through that same time period of course there was a civil war thrown in, and various other changes. Yet they also found the time, despite the shortage of people and general workers, to build many of those huge and spectacular ‘founded’ buildings that litter each state. The massive neoclassical post offices, schools and universities, asylums, court houses and more. Clearly there was a surplus of funding, architects, construction specialists, stone masons, craftsman and more for that, but no-one to work on a farm. What rotten luck. But that’s ok, because they decided children’s public auctions would be a good fix for that. Clearly the orphan train model wasn’t going to be able to last forever, but it seems to have ended in 1929, just as the Great Depression kicked in. And from stories and the odd photograph of that time, they say it was so harsh, many people were forced to sell their own children to survive.
A middleman temporarily removed from the equation of how they can part you from your offspring. But it seems they just regrouped and after that decade of dust and doom came a new business model, same as with Europe. The destabilisation of war and disease, and control over your livelihood, food and family, to make sure they have systems in place to keep their commercial enterprises afloat and well stocked. Which unfortunately needs to have the appearance of systems for us, for our health and for our safety, and for the stability of society, allowing some to operate in the open and others to carry on unseen and undisturbed. Like much that has gone on and goes on, we only see what we see, and know what we know, but it seems there is so much more…
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MKW Publishing 