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Irish-Catholic history

A French Parish Gets an Irish Priest, And War Breaks Out in Fall River

In 1884, a French parish in Fall River, Mass., locked its Irish pastor out of the church and made his life a living hell. Parishioners evicted him from the rectory, seized the parish finances, insulted him on the street and disrupted Mass. The ensuing turmoil went all the way to the Vatican.

Bishop Thomas Francis Hendricken had deliberately appointed Father Samuel McGee as pastor of Notre Dame de Lourdes. He wanted the clannish Franco-American parishioners to assimilate to their new home. The parishioners resisted. One Franco-American said he would ‘stand on the brink of hell’ before accepting an Irish pastor.

The French and the Irish didn’t get along in many New England cities, not just Fall River. Most were poor Quebecois who had left grinding poverty in Canada to work in New England’s textile mills. They earned the enmity of the Irish, who had come before them, because they worked for lower wages, even as strikebreakers. The French, in turn, resented the Irish who came to dominate local politics – and, in many cases, the Roman Catholic Church.

In Fall River, Bishop Hendricken made matters worse by insisting the French parishioners submit to his authority. The Franco-Americans retaliated by going to Rome and threatening to break off from the Roman Catholic Church.

Flint was anything but pleasant for Father McGee.

The French Parish

French immigrants from Canada fiercely protected their language and culture, which they called ‘survivance.’ They viewed their parish priests as the guardians of their identity and as reminders of their absent homeland. And they felt they had a right to a Franco-American priest.

In 1874, a charismatic Franco-American priest, Father P.J.B. Bedard, established the Parish of Notre Dame de Lourdes in the village of Flint. It had about 250 Franco-American families and 40 Irish families who worshipped in a small wooden chapel.

Bishop Thomas Hendricken

Eight years later, the Irish broke off and formed their own church nearby.

“This action drew a line between the French and Irish Catholics of Flint Village, and both parties were content in their own independence,” reported the Boston Daily Globe.

Bedard died suddenly and his sickly replacement soon put in for a new assignment.

That gave Bishop Hendricken his chance. Born in Galway, he opposed the ethnic-language churches. And so he appointed an Irish-Canadian priest, Father Samuel McGee.

When a delegation came to him to demand a French priest, Hendricken told them McGee came from Canada and spoke French better than they did. To make matters worse, he said they’d all be speaking English in 10 years anyway.

Samuel McGee

The members of the French parish retaliated against the bishop by making life miserable for the Rev. Samuel McGee.

When the priest tried to enter Notre Dame de Lourdes in December 1884, he found the doors nailed shut. When he finally got into the church, parishioners confined him in the vestry and threatened him with violence.

They evicted him from the rectory, and he went to live with his brother. They kept his share of the collections and refused to let him officiate at baptisms and weddings.

2nd Notre Dame de Lourdes

McGee couldn’t walk down a street without hearing hoots and insults from the French parishioners. They threw stones and whiskey bottles filled with sewage through his window at his home. Vandals broke into the church and disabled the organ bellows.

Ironically, attendance at the French parish increased when McGee said Mass, but for the wrong reason. Parishioners came to church to disrupt the service. When Father McGee tried to give a sermon, the parishioners coughed so loudly they couldn’t hear his voice. Four police officers stationed in the church couldn’t do anything about it. Father McGee continued speaking over the cacophony.

“Father McGee is evidently possessed of considerable pluck,” reported the Globe.

Things got worse. Parishioners followed him out of Mass and called him ‘a damned Irishman.’ When a crowd of Irish Catholics arrived to support Father McGee one Sunday, the police had to quell the near-riot that ensued.

The choir of the French parish refused to sing, so McGee organized a new one. Then he discovered the old choir had locked the entrance to the choir loft. The old choir wouldn’t leave, so the priest called the police, who arrested four of the choir members. A judge fined them $1 each.

Rome Intervenes

Samuel McGee finally asked for a reassignment, and Bishop Hendricken complied. But he stunned the members of the French parish in February 1885 when he suddenly closed the church.

The laymen of Notre Dame de Lourdes raised money to hire ecclesiastical lawyers in Rome. They sent a Fall River liquor dealer, Narcisse-Rodolphe Martineau, to the Vatican to plead their case.

Martineau received two audiences with Pope Leo XIII and with the cardinals. “Representations have been made to the Pope that, if the disaffection in the French parishes continues, there may be a large secession from the Catholic communion,” reported the Globe.

Conversely, Bishop Hendricken believed he wouldn’t be able to govern his diocese if Fall River’s French parish prevailed. He reopened Notre Dame de Lourdes with another Irish priest. A thousand parishioners boycotted the Mass. Again Hendricken closed the church.

In the end, the Vatican intervened. Hendricken was told to calm things down with a show of leniency. In September 1885, 10 months after the trouble started, Notre Dame de Lourdes opened with an Irish priest and a Franco-American assistant. The parishioners, at first furious, realized the Irish priest was close to retirement. The French parish would soon have its French priest.

On March 21, 1886, the Rev. J.M. Laflamme was promoted as pastor for Notre Dame de Lourdes. Finally, the affair ended.

With thanks to MassMoments, Historic Fires of Fall River by Stefani Koorey and Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities by Yves Roby. This story about the French parish in Fall River was updated in 2022.

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The Tragedy of Audrey Munson, America’s First Supermodel

Though her modeling career ended by 1922, you can still see the image of Audrey Munson in museums from Hartford to San Francisco.

A statue of her, America’s first supermodel, presides over Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. She holds a Bible as Evangeline in the Longfellow Memorial in Cambridge, Mass.

She was even in mass circulation for decades as the model for the Walking Liberty Half Dollar.

Audrey Munson as Walking Liberty

People who saw Audrey Munson everywhere in New York nicknamed her ‘Miss Manhattan.’

Audrey appears atop the Municipal Building, at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and on the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza.

She fell as swiftly and as spectacularly as she rose to fame. By the time the coins bearing her image were taken out of circulation, she was completely forgotten, confined to an insane asylum and then buried in an unmarked grave.

She always believed her demise resulted from a gypsy curse.

The Curse of Audrey Munson

Audrey Munson was born in Rochester, N.Y., on June 8, 1891. Her father, Edgar, worked as a trolley car conductor with dreams of hitting it big in real estate. Her Irish Catholic mother Kittie divorced Edgar when Audrey was eight.

She had to, she said, because he was having an open affair with another woman he later married.

When Audrey was five years old, her mother took her to have her fortune told in East Syracuse, N.Y. Gypsy Queen Eliza told her:

You shall be beloved and famous. But when you think that happiness is yours, its Dead Sea fruit ‘shall turn to ashes in your mouth.

You, who shall throw away thousands of dollars as a caprice, shall want for a penny. You, who shall mock at love, shall seek love without finding.

Seven men shall love you. Seven times you shall be led by the man who loves you to the steps of the altar, but never shall you wed.

Ever since then, she would consider the gypsy’s words a curse.

Audrey Munson in 1915

Fame and Fortune

When Audrey turned eight, Kittie moved them to Providence, where they lived in a series of boardinghouses.

Audrey grew into a tall, striking beauty. Most of all, her good looks personified the Beaux-Arts ideal of womanhood. Kittie saw her daughter’s potential and pushed her toward the theater.

She debuted on stage as a teenager in 1908 as a member of Gerald Hampton’s Dancin’ Dolls at Rocky Point Amusement Park in Warwick, R.I. By then, Kittie had moved them to New York City, and Audrey found work posing for artists.

Two years earlier, at the age of 15, she had caught the attention of photographer Felix Benedict Herzog. According to legend, he spotted her on the street in Manhattan, and he introduced her to his circle of artists. His friend Isidore Konti persuaded Audrey to pose for him nude.

From 1910 to 1915, Audrey Munson was the darling of the Beaux-Arts set, thriving with commissions during New York City’s great building boom. She modeled, as a goddess or allegorical image, for Daniel Chester French, Alexander Stirling Calder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Adolph Alexander Weinman.

She appeared in two dozen sculptures in New York City alone. She also posed for three-fifths of the sculptures for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915.

Audrey Munson as Evangeline

Before the Fall

Audrey Munson had money and fame. Her father complained she spent money like water. In 1916 she moved to California to appear in the infant motion picture industry.

Audrey Munson took off her clothes for her first film, Inspiration, in which she played a sculptor’s model. It was considered the first non-pornographic film to feature a nude woman.

She acted in three more films and then returned to the East Coast. She began dating rich men in New York and Newport, R.I., including silver heir Hermann Oelrichs, Jr. He was the richest bachelor in America.

Audrey Munson as Mourning Victory, considered Daniel Chester French’s masterpiece

Audrey showed signs of trouble in January 1919 when she wrote a rambling letter to the U.S. State Department. In it, she claimed Hermann Oelrichs, Jr., belonged to a pro-German cabal that drove her out of the film industry.

At that point, she and her mother lived in a boarding house in New York. An elderly doctor, Walter Wilkins, owned the house. In February 1919 Wilkins murdered his wife Julia outside of their Long Island home by beating her with a hammer and lead pipe.

Police subsequently discovered Wilkins had become obsessed with Audrey Munson. As a result, they believed he killed his wife to be with her.

Audrey and her mother had left New York before the murder, but police tracked them down in Canada. Audrey denied any involvement with Wilkins. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Before he met the electric chair, he hanged himself in his cell.

The publicity ruined Audrey’s career.

Attempted Suicide

Finding no work, Audrey and Kittie moved to Syracuse, N.Y., where Kittie supported them by selling kitchen utensils door to door.

By 1922 Audrey at 39 had a reputation as the ‘once-famous artists model.’ She tried to commit suicide that year by drinking bichloride of mercury.

On her 40^th birthday, her mother petitioned to commit her to an insane asylum. Audrey remained in the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, N.Y., for 65 years. Decades passed when no one came to visit her. Finally, Darlene Bradley rediscovered her 93-year-old Aunt Audrey in 1984.

Audrey Munson died at the age of 104 on Feb. 20, 1996. She was buried in an unmarked grave in New Haven Cemetery in New Haven, N.Y. But on her 125^th birthday, her family placed a simple tombstone on her grave.

With thanks to The Curse of Beauty: The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America’s First Supermodel by James Bone.

Photo: Mourning Victory By liz west from Boxborough, MA, USA – Mourning Victory, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46563394

If you like this story about Audrey Munson, you may also enjoy this story about Ethel Reed (here), the beautiful poster model who disappeared. This story was updated in 2023.

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How Irish-Catholic Louise Guiney Outwitted Her Protestant Postal Customers

When Irish-Catholic Louise Guiney got the job of postmistress in Auburndale, Mass., the town’s Protestants boycotted her stamps.

That created a problem. She needed money to support herself and her poetry, and a postmistress’s compensation depended on sales.

Fortunately, she had many, many friends in Boston’s artistic and intellectual circles who helped her get by.

Some view her as the ‘lost lady of American letters,’ but not because of her postal service job.

Louise Guiney by Fred Holland Day

Louise Guiney

She was born Jan. 7, 1861, in Roxbury, Mass., the daughter of Patrick Robert Guiney and Jeanette Margaret Doyle.

Her father emigrated from Ireland with very little money, but worked his way through college, became a lawyer and served heroically in the Civil War. He achieved the rank of brigadier general. After the war he entered politics, winning office as a Republican–one of the first Irish-Catholics to do so. He lost a bid for Congress but won as assistant district attorney. Plagued by his war injuries, he died when Louise was 16 and left little money.

A devout Catholic, she was educated at a convent in Providence, but couldn’t afford college. She continued to study on her own and to write poetry published in the Atlantic, Harper’s and Scribner’s.

Her biographer, Henry Fairbanks, called her a rare combination: ‘pure of heart, brilliant of mind.’ Critics considered her a bridge between Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She also bridged the intellectual and artistic circles in fin-de-siecle Boston.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Bohemian

She formed a close friendship with a Bohemian group from a somewhat raffish Beacon Hill neighborhood that included the architect Ralph Adams Cram, Fred Holland Day, artist Tom Meteyard, poets Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. Across the hill, she belonged to a group of intellectual women that included Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Fields and Alice Brown, with whom she is believed to have a Boston marriage.

Her financial straits forced her to take a job as postmistress in Auburndale. The postmistress’ compensation was determined by how much business the post office did. So Louise Guiney became victim of an anti-Catholic plot. Ralph Adams Cram, who organized a response, recollected,

The suburb of Auburndale was a favorite retreat of retired Protestant missionaries. …Suddenly the business began to decline rather alarmingly. Certain Sherlock Holmes procedures … revealed just what was happening… .. The situation was intolerable to the evangelical mind; therefore the Papist incumbent must be driven out by the simple expedient of transferring the trade to other neighbouring post offices – which was done.

Concerted action on the part of Lou Guiney’s friends produced notable results. We all bought postage stamps … in such quantities that the Auburndale post office advanced in the matter of business done, and with such leaps and bounds that finally an emissary from the Post Office Department was sent out to ascertain what it all meant.

Louise Guiney eventually took a job at the Boston Public Library, where she wrote poetry and essays in her spare time.

Boston Public Library

Oxford

In 1901, she moved to Oxford, England, where she used the libraries to research an anthology of Catholic poets. She also wrote several biographies and edited books about the Catholic literary tradition in England and Ireland. Though her health suffered, she stinted on food and coal to buy books.

Today, critics note her lyrical, Old English-style poems recall 17th-century English poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation.

Informed by her religious faith, Guiney’s works reflect her concern with the Catholic tradition in literature and often emphasize moral rectitude and heroic gallantry.

Louise Guiney died Nov. 2, 1920, of a stroke at age 59, leaving her work unfinished.

This story was updated in 2022.

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James Healy, Portland’s African-American Bishop Who Passed for White

James Healy, born a slave, became the Roman Catholic bishop of Portland and founder of the Diocese of Manchester in the late 19^th century. He has been called the first African-American bishop, though he was three-fourths Irish and nearly everyone thought he was white.

He was the oldest of 10 children born to Michael Morris Healy and his biracial common-law wife, Mary Eliza Clark (sometimes referenced as Mary Eliza Smith). Michael owned a southern plantation. Eliza was his slave.

Healy, an unusual man, harbored ambitions for his children. Three became nuns, three became priests and one had a successful career in the Revenue Cutter Service. Son James and his brother Patrick rose to positions of great influence within the Roman Catholic Church in America.

Bishop James Healy

James Healy Born

Michael Healy was born in County Roscommon, Ireland. He served in the British Army in Canada during the War of 1812 until he deserted. He then moved to rural Georgia near Macon and won a substantial plot of acreage in a land lottery. Michael eventually acquired a 1,500-acre cotton plantation. He also acquired 49 slaves and a library of 100 volumes that included books on religion and philosophy.

In the late 1820s, Michael Healy became sexually involved with Clark, a teen-aged slave. Beginning with James Healy, born on April 6, 1830, they had 10 children. Michael acknowledged all of them.

One Drop Rule

The children were considered black because of the one-drop rule, widely accepted in 19^th-century America. It proclaimed that people were black if they had one drop of African-American blood in them. James O’Toole, in Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920, explains:

The rigidity of racial distinctions had to be maintained as much as possible. The idea that a person might be able to cross over from one race to another was out of the question….The distinction between “white blood” and “black blood” came to seem so fundamental that any attempt to mix the two had to be censured. The twisted logic of slavery depended on the maintenance of clear dividing lines: slaves were black, blacks were slaves, and it had to be that way.

Georgia law forbade Michael Healy from marrying Mary Eliza Clark. It also forbade him from freeing her or any of their 10 legally enslaved children. And since they were slaves, Georgia law forbid them from being educated. So in 1837, Michael Healy began sending his children, and later his wife, north. There they passed as white.

The Catholic Church

Patrick Healy

James Healy and two younger brothers, Hugh and Patrick, attended Quaker schools in Flushing, N.Y. Their father came to know Bishop John Fitzpatrick of Boston. Fitzpatrick then arranged for the boys to enroll in the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

James Healy earned a B.A. from Holy Cross in 1849 and declared his intention to enter the priesthood. But he couldn’t study at the Jesuit seminary in Maryland, a slave state. Fitzpatrick, who knew of his parentage, helped him enroll in a Montreal seminary. Then he helped James enroll in the Sulpician Seminary in Paris. In 1854 he was ordained at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Fitzpatrick stepped up to help Healy again and made him his secretary and chancellor of the Diocese of Boston. Neither revealed that James Healy had African-American blood.

In 1866 James Healy became pastor of St. James Church, Boston’s largest Roman Catholic congregation. In that post, he spoke out against the General Court’s attempts to tax Catholic Churches. He also founded several Catholic charities to aid Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston during the famine years.

James Healy bought a wooden frame house in Newton, Mass., where he lived with his brothers and sisters. The siblings remained close over the years.

Bishop of Portland

In 1875, Pope Pius IX appointed James Healy bishop of Portland. He presided over the diocese for 25 years. Healy supervised the creation of the Diocese of Manchester and established 60 churches, 68 missions, 18 convents and 18 schools. He also excommunicated members of a labor union, the Knights of Labor, the only member of America’s Roman Catholic establishment to do so.

James Healy completely identified as a white man. Apparently members of the African-American community knew enough about him to ask him for help. When a young African-American seminarian from Maryland asked to come to Portland to work as a priest, Healy refused.

Pope Leo XIII named him an assistant to the Papal throne two months before he died on Aug. 5, 1800.

Siblings

Michael Healy

Three of James Healy’s brothers – Patrick, Hugh and Sherwood – graduated from Holy Cross. Hugh went into business and died at 21. Patrick joined the Jesuit order, earned a PhD and in 1874 was named president of Georgetown University.

Sherwood also became a Jesuit priest with expertise in canon law and Gregorian chants. He became director of the Catholic seminary in Troy, N.Y., and rector of the Cathedral in Boston.

Another brother, Michael, joined the Revenue Cutter Service (now the Coast Guard) and was promoted to captain. He patrolled the Alaska territory for 20 years. A hard drinker nicknamed Hell Roaring Mike, he married the daughter of an Irish immigrant who bore one child who survived, despite 18 pregnancies.

Their three sisters became nuns, though one left the order, moved to Boston and married an Irishman. Eliza became Mother Superior at the Villa, a Catholic convent and school in St. Albans, Vt.

James Healy Award

Since 1993, a group called the Black Catholic Ministries has hosted the Bishop James Augustine Healy Award Dinner. The Ministries, part of the Archidocese of Boston, holds the dinner to honor the legacy of the first recognized black bishop in the United States.

Images: Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception By Farragutful – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48304104.

This story about James Healy was updated in 2022.

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The Night Ethel Kennedy Met Jackie Bouvier

Ethel Kennedy loved to be the center of attention, but she couldn’t compete with her sister-in-law, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Ethel was outdoorsy and fun, devoted to her husband Robert F. Kennedy and eventually mother to 11 rambunctious children.

Jackie was something else, and their relationship was sometimes strained. Ethel called Jackie ‘the Debutante.’ Jackie called Ethel ‘a baby-making machine – wind her up and she gets pregnant.’

Ethel Kennedy

She was born April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of George and Anne Skakel. Her father was a self-made millionaire, her mother came from a poor South Side Irish Catholic family.

The Skakels moved east when Ethel turned five in 1933, finally settling in a 31-room mansion in Greenwich, Conn., in 1936. The rowdy Irish brood never quite fit in with the WASPy snobs of Greenwich.

Ethel shared her mother’s devotion to Catholicism. An indifferent student, she excelled at sports. She attended Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, where she became friends with Jean Kennedy, the second-youngest of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children. Ethel Skakel met Bobby Kennedy on a ski weekend with Jean, and they married in June 1950.

St. Patrick’s Day

When Jack and Jackie were dating. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library.

As they approached their third wedding anniversary, Bobby, a newly minted lawyer, worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C. Bobby’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, had just won election to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.

Ethel Kennedy had already given birth to two children, but that didn’t stop her from throwing parties. She would later be known for wild affairs in which guests in evening clothes were thrown into the swimming pool.

Ethel Kennedy decided to hold a St. Patrick’s Day party in 1953 and invited Bobby’s older brother. Jack Kennedy asked if he could bring his new girlfriend, Jacqueline Bouvier. Ethel called Jackie and told her the same thing she told all her guests: Wear black.

Most of the guests drove or took a cab to the party, and they all dutifully wore black. Jack Kennedy arrived on crutches. Jackie showed up last — in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Underneath her black fur she wore a black evening gown embroidered with silver thread, a pearl necklace and earrings.

Ethel suddenly appeared, wearing a shimmering emerald gown that assured she’d capture everyone’s attention. Except when people were looking at Jackie Bouvier.

Jackie held court by the fireplace, then excused herself with ‘a dreadful headache.’ She made it a point, though, to say goodbye to each dazzled guest before leaving in her chauffeured car.

Postscript

During the White House years, Ethel Kennedy sometimes filled in when Jackie couldn’t – or wouldn’t – fulfill a social commitment. Once Jackie begged off a ‘meet-and-greet’ with White House visitors, and Ethel hosted the event instead. Jackie went off to play tennis. Her press secretary lied through her teeth to Ethel, saying Jackie wasn’t feeling well.

During the Kennedy presidency, Ethel’s madcap parties at her home in McLean, Va., made news. She would let loose a live chicken on the dining room table or push presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., into the swimming pool. Jack and Jackie Kennedy rarely went to Ethel’s parties.

Bobby Kennedy, Eunice Shriver, Caroline Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, John Kennedy

After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy consoled Jackie – to such an extent many believed they were carrying on a romance.

Ethel Kennedy may have thought so too. Her sister-in-law, Eunice Shriver, was quoted as saying to her, “Well, what are you going to do about it — Bobby’s spending an awful lot of time with the ‘widder.'” Ethel said nothing in response.

After Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Ethel’s children grew even more unruly. Things got so bad that Jackie wouldn’t let John and Caroline visit or spend time with their cousins.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version now available.

As First Lady, Jackie danced the Twist and drank daiquiris. Find out more about her and five other first ladies in The New England Historical Society’s Eat Like a President. It has recipes, too.

Available as an ebook and in paperback.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Orphan Train and the Children Who Rode It

In 1926, a four-year-old orphan named Lorraine Williams and 13 other children were scrubbed, dressed in new clothes and put onto an orphan train leaving Grand Central Station.

Children riding an orphan train.

The children didn’t know where they were going, but their destination was likely to be better than where they’d been. Lorraine went to an orphanage as an infant and went hungry for the next four years. She remembered how every night at dinner she ate a thin vegetable soup from a shallow tin pie plate.

Lorraine Williams belonged to the 200,000 or so orphaned and abandoned children who rode the orphan trains to new homes between 1850 and 1930.

They followed the expanding railroads from Boston, New York and other East Coast cities to New Hampshire, Vermont, upstate New York and the Midwest. Some had good luck. They found good homes with loving parents. Others had to work as servants or farmhands, abused or never fully accepted by their new families.

Some did well, like John Green Brady, elected governor of Alaska, and Andrew Burke, elected governor of North Dakota. Others didn’t turn out so well: Billy the Kid supposedly rode an orphan train.

The First Orphan Train

The first orphan train left Boston in 1850 and carried 30 homeless waifs to New Hampshire and Vermont. The Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute sent them. A Protestant charity, it sent agents to search the streets, docks, theaters and railway stations for ‘street arabs’ and guttersnipes – in other words, children in need of supervision.

Joseph Barry, the Children’s Mission’s first agent, found a 13-year-old girl whose drunken parents pulled out her eyelashes.

He found scores of boys playing and gambling with props and cents, not only on weekdays, but on Sundays; and rum-shops kept open, in defiance of the law, where youths were enticed to almost certain destruction. He has often seen boys from eight to twelve years of age intoxicated, and found that many of the rum-sellers received stolen goods from the boys in payment for the liquor they drank; thus doing the double work of making drunkards and thieves at the same time.

A Boston boy finds his dinner. Photo by Lewis Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

Many were the children of impoverished Irish Catholic immigrants or immigrants themselves. Later, they included children whose fathers were killed in the Civil War.

Hard Wooden Seats

Four-year-old Howard Engert rode the train with his older brother Fred in 1925. “I can recall the hard wooden seats,” he said. “They got so uncomfortable, some of the kids slept on the floor, even though we had no pillows. I remember we ate sandwiches for most meals. The train stopped a lot and it seemed like we were always getting on or off it.” After a week’s journey, Howard and his brother found separate homes in Osceola, Neb.

At the time, people viewed the practice of sending children away on orphan trains as a modern, efficient way to take the surplus juvenile population from overcrowded cities. The children would be placed decent Yankee homes where they could receive a proper upbringing. The Children’s Mission allowed children to be indentured as servants.

Children’s Aid

Three years after that first orphan train left Boston, Charles Loring Brace began sending more than 300 children a year on orphan trains from New York City.

Charles Loring Brace.

Born on June 19, 1826, in Litchfield, Conn., Brace started the Children’s Aid Society in New York at the age of 27. He became known as the champion of orphan trains, with publicity help from Horatio Alger. After the Civil War, Brace sent 1,000 children a year to Christian homes in the rural Midwest.

Lorraine Williams rode the orphan train to Kirksville, Mo., where she and the other children were taken to a crowded church. Adults picked them out to take home like puppies.

An old man approached Lorraine and said, “I’ll take that one. My wife is sick and I need someone to wash the dishes.” Lorraine refused to go with him. A man with a gentle voice handed her a strawberry ice cream cone. “You can have one every day,” he said. She took his hand. He looked at his wife and said, “Minnie, let’s take this little one home.”

“I could not have had more loving parents, “ she recalled later in life. In 1910, the Children’s Aid Society reported 87 percent of the placements worked out well.

Civil War Orphans

In 1865, 10 Boston businessmen formed the New England Home for Little Wanderers to care for the children orphaned by the Civil War. The agency began sending children out west, not as indentured servants but for adoption.

The Rev. S.S. Cummings explained how the Home for Little Wanderers’ orphan train worked:

…[W]e will start off with a company of thirty or forty children, not knowing where we shall find a home for them. The process is simple. We look over the map of the country, and line of railroads, and decide on some town to make our first point, and then write to the pastors of the churches that we will be there at a given time, generally arriving on Saturday, and ask them to make arrangements for our holding services in their churches on the Sabbath. . .

William and Thomas, age 11 and 8, rode the orphan train in 1880. William was taken into a good home, Thomas was abused. They reunited later in life.

The children at the church in the presence of the people and an appropriate talk of our duty to provide for, and take care of, orphan children, brings our work and the object of our visit before the public preparatory for the work of adoption on Monday. We invite the people to meet us on Monday and see the children and make a selection if desirable. Meantime, we form a brief acquaintance with the pastor and a few good reliable citizens that are always ready to give any information desirable as to the fitness of families to become responsible for the charge of the children.

Hazelle Latimer

Hazelle Latimer rode the orphan train in 1918. Decades later she recalled the experience.

That was an ordeal that no child should go through. They pulled us and pushed us and shoved us. And this old man–I had never seen anything like anybody chewing tobacco. I knew nothing about it. This old man came up and his mouth was all stained brown and I thought, well, he’d been eating chocolate candy or something. Then he said, ‘Open your mouth.’ I looked at him and he–‘I want to see about your teeth.’ I opened my mouth and he stuck his finger in my mouth and just–rubbed over my teeth. And his old dirty hands just–I wanted to bite, but I didn’t.

Agents went round once a year to make sure the children received proper care and education. A child could be removed from an unsuitable home. Such was the case with Hazelle Lattimer:

We got to the house and this old lady met me and says, “You look all right…” Her daughter-in-law was waiting for her husband to come from the war…She told me just exactly why those people wanted me, that she would be gone and I…would be big enough to take care of that house.

And that’s all they wanted with me. And I said, “What can I do?” She says, “Go back to the [agent ] and tell them it’s just not for you.” She drew me a map of where I was…And when I walked in [the agent asked], “Well, what happened to you?” And I said, “They didn’t want a child. They wanted a slave.”

Fortunately, Hazelle Latimer found a happy home in her next and permanent placement.

Slave Auctions

The orphan trains had detractors. In New York, people called Brace a ‘child stealer’ and criticized him for ‘shipping them wholesale into the country.’ Some of the states where children were sent complained they were placed indiscriminately in poorly supervised foster families. Abolitionists described the displays of children as ‘slave auctions.’

Luring Catholics

In Boston, they got criticized for turning immigrant Catholic children to Protestants, since children went to mostly Protestant families, their ties to their birth families severed.

The Rev. George F. Haskins, spokesman for Bishop John B. Fitzpatrick of Boston, accused the Children’s Mission of luring Catholic children onto the trains to turn them into Protestants:

To aid in the work of perversion … societies were formed to receive Catholic children and provide for them till a number should be collected sufficient to fill a car, when they should be steamed swiftly off to some western state and there sold, body and soul, to farmers and squatters. Missionaries, both male and female, were hired to prowl about certain quarters of the city, to talk with children in the streets, like the Manicheans of old, and invite and urge them to leave their friends and homes, picturing to them vistas of abundant food, clothes and money. Sunday schools were opened, and teachers employed to waylay children on their path to their own schools and to bribe them into theirs. If pastors and teaches sought their missing lambs in these wolves’ dens, they found unfriendly policemen at the doors to prevent them entering.

He knew of what he spoke. Before he converted to Catholicism, he had served as the Episcopalian pastor of the Grace Church in Boston. And he had lured Catholic boys into the church with candy and games in hopes of winning their souls.

The Last Generation

The last orphan train left New York City on May 31, 1929, bound for Sulphur Springs, Texas. The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression left Midwestern families unable to feed another mouth. And attitudes toward homeless children and poor families had changed. People thought it better to keep families intact, and states passed laws that barred agencies from sending children out of state for placement.

Today, an estimated one in 25 Americans has a connection to an orphan train rider.

In 1986, Mary Ellen Johnson, a publisher’s assistant, discovered an orphan train had delivered children to her home in Springdale, Ark. She founded the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, which hosts orphan train reunions in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma. The National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kans., allows surviving orphan train riders to keep in touch with each other.

OTHSA

In 2001, Fred Engert Swedenborg and his brother Howard Engert Hurd belonged to the OTHSA. They put together an exhibit on the orphan trains for the Plainsman Museum in Aurora, Neb.

“People seeing the exhibit talk about how terrible it was that children were put on trains, but I tell them, look at all the kids today who are in abusive homes or are stuck in bad foster homes,” Fred said.

“The system did its best for my brother and me,” said Howard. “I think the orphan trains were a wonderful thing.”

With thanks to We Rode the Orphan Trains by Andrea Warren and Boston’s Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830-1930 by Peter C. Holloran. This story about the orphan trains was updated in 2023. If you liked this story about the orphan train, you may also like to read about Lewis Hine’s photographs of child laborers here. Orphan train image By Unknown author – http://bd.blog.leparisien.fr/archive/2012/10/24/le-train-des-orphelins.html, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32901793. Charles Loring Brace PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18297658.

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