Nancy Marie Payne- “Jenny and the Orphan train, 1853”

Nancy Marie Payne, our July speaker, has ten years of
experience as a professional storyteller. She presented a first-
person narrative of a ten-year-old girl, Jenny, who traveled on the
first “orphan train” out of New York City in 1853. While Jenny was fictionalized, everything else about the story was fact-based.
Before telling the tale, Nancy sketched the historical context, which she researched in order to craft her story. New York City, in the middle of the 19th century, was being inundated by immigrants. This exploding population, crammed into the confines of Manhattan, resulted in crowded slum conditions, disgusting sanitation, and frequent fires that fed on largely wood construction. People in those times had a different view of children –
they were considered merely “small adults,” with scant understanding of the psychological differences we now take for granted. [This is hard to figure, since most adults must have been children themselves at some time – FSR]. At any rate, they didn’t have our modern indulgent sensibility where children were concerned. The difficult conditions and general fragility of life in mid-1800s New York meant that it teemed with thousands of parentless children – “street rats” who subsisted in whatever ways they could manage. Some did get scooped into charitable institutions, but that was a doubtful blessing, as 90% did not emerge alive from that experience. Enter, in 1853, Rev. Charles Loring Brace, starting the Children’s Aid Society, with a different idea: getting these kids out of New York, to the frontier west, where families might want to take them in, in good part because they needed the extra hands. (Formal adoption was rare – too cumbersome.) Through trial and error, Brace found it worked better with younger children than with more hardened cases.“Jenny” was, again, ten, living a more or less middle-class existence until, after playing in the streets one day, she returns home to find it wasn’t there, having been consumed, together with her parents, by one of the all too frequent fires. Jenny lives for a while in a box shared with a street rat girl she had met earlier, until they are grabbed by a cop and wind up taken in by Brace’s Children’s Aid Society. The pair, together with 35 other children, are given new clothes and launched on an odyssey to Michigan. One silver-tongued kid wangles himself a family slot before the trip is hardly started; he is replaced by a new fellow caught pickpocketing the expedition’s clergyman leader. After a steamboat ride to Albany, the children are loaded into a boxcar that Brace had arranged; they are joined by a host of freeloaders who also push themselves into the boxcar. So after that, Brace ditched the boxcar idea. Anyhow, they eventually get to Dowagiac, Michigan where, one by one, the children do get hooked up with families and even Jenny, despite being afflicted with anxiety-induced hiccups, finally finds a slot. Of course, in a lot of cases, these situations were not made in Heaven either, and abuse was rampant.
[FSR comment: this program was good corrective for those who believe in the myth of “the good old days” and think progress is overrated or even bad.]