Orphan trains : the story of Charles Loring Brace and the children he saved and failed /
Stephen O'Connor.
- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- xxi, 362 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm Paperback book
Originally published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 345-349) and index.
Part I: Want. Testimony: John Brady and Harry Morris -- The good father -- Flood of humanity -- Part II: Doing. Testimony: John Jackson -- City missionary -- Draining the city, saving the children -- Journey to Dowagiac -- A voice among the newsboys -- Happy circle -- Almost a miracle -- Part III: Redoing. Testimony: Lotte Stern -- Invisible children -- Neglect of the poor -- The trials of Charley Miller -- The death and life of Charles Loring Brace.
Publisher description: In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant youth, both orphans and runaways, filled the streets. For years the city had been sweeping these children into prisons or almshouses, but in 1853 the young minister Charles Loring Brace proposed a radical solution to the problem by creating the Children's Aid Society, an organization that fought to provide homeless children with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family in the country. Combining a biography of Brace with firsthand accounts of orphans, Stephen O'Connor here tells of the orphan trains that, between 1854 and 1929, spirited away some 250,000 destitute children to rural homes in every one of the forty-eight contiguous states.