Ridgway Public Library

"Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to 'aging out' out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse ... As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren't as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds...

Discusses the placement of over 200,000 orphaned or abandoned children in homes throughout the Midwest from 1854 to 1929 by recounting the story of one boy and his brothers.

Looks at the history of orphan trains from the perspective of an orphan child heading to the Midwest, a Midwestern family awaiting a child, and a New York City child welfare worker.

In 1856, having traveled with his young sister from New York to a foster home on a farm in Missouri, ten-year-old Danny plots to get his foster father to send for and marry his mother.

After eleven-year-old orphan-train rider David Howard settles with a strict Texas farm family, his best friend, an ex-slave, is threatened by the growing presence of the Ku-Klux Klan.

Young minister Charles Loring Brace founded the Children's Aid Society, sending orphans west to begin new lives with farm families. Until 1929, Brace's Society and other charities sent more than 150,000 neglected children by train to 47 states.

In the late 1800s, Marianne travels westward on the Orphan Train in hopes of being placed with a caring family.

A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and a life of unpaid slavery.

Breanna helped cure the children of influenza. But could anything heal their broken hearts?

In Wyoming in 1874, Mary, Johnny, and Lizzie Marston, along with 60 other children, line the platform at the Cheyenne train station as Dan and Clara Forbes and other locals contemplate taking one child home to a new life. Will they be separated? Will they be wanted? Will the West offer a better life than the one they left behind?