The Springfield News-Leader from Springfield, Missouri • Page 7

NEWS-LEADER OzarksNow.com FROM PAGE ONE Tuesday, June 4, 2002 7A 1 Concept born in New York squalor A minister created the prograrq that would send waves of destitute youngs'ters west. a ii i rf" 't 'Riders families invited to reunion Orphan train riders and their descendants are invited to a reunion gathering in Monett this weekend. The informal event is a time for sharing sto- ries and learning more about that historical era. Mary Ellen Johnson, founder and director of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, will speak at the event. Author and researcher Evelyn Trickel will also attend.

When: early registration and reception p.m. Friday; all-day gathering 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Saturday Where: Monett Senior Center, 405 Dairy 235-3285 Registration: Early registration is $10, which includes Friday night reception and Saturday lunch; Saturday at the door registration is $12 and includes lunch Information: Call Ida Mae Wil-hoit at (918) 743-2110; reservations are preferred, but everyone is welcome Books, video tapes, T-shirts and more will be offered for sale from 0THSA. Riders and their families are invited to bring photographs, artwork, poetry and historical displays. From 1854 to 1929, agencies such as the New York Children's Aid Society gathered 200,000 children living in squalor and placed them aboard trains bound for destinations across America.

The "Orphan Trains" carried many of the children to loving homes, and many others to hard labor and disappointment. Today, there are more than 4 million descendants of the children of the "Free Home Placing Out" program living in the United States. WHERE THE CHILDREN WERE PLACED recalled as a ticket to the Midwest, the program actually placed children all over the nation and on into Canada. Listed York Children's Aid Society (destination number of orphans); no formal records remain of the other agencies that placed uii-hiiun i Vermont 262 I New York Wisconsin Pennsylvania 2,679 Z.750 luc 2,750 Indiana rr i i rt. 3.955 Illinois 8,176 I I I 1 i I I i i 1 Although the Orphan Trains are often below are children placed by the New children.

I I. niiinfiiii i Hildas i Indian California 168, Placed in Missouri 1 1 ni Utah31 1 i i Tk. A wubec JC 34e-P-TL0 Colorado 1,563 Kansas 4,150 I iLJTW' gr Ohio L2Z? I loklahoma051 1 r-C 3h. aoo North Dakota 975 territories 59 South Dakota 43 Arkansas 136 I avuin UdHOia I mb i i fesJ' I LM Ct) IT VTV- IUd-r---rt i -uor- -vim a -v. Dozens of small towns took in a few foundlings.

While the record-keeping was poor, records show these communities received the most: Rockport41 Forest City 15 Alabama 39 Missouri 6,088 South Carolina 191WJ nuklana 79 Tennessee 233 i By Sony Hocklander NEWS-LEADER Garbage lay in the open and sewage flowed alongside city streets. Homeless children slept where they could. Some found shelter in lodging houses. Most slept in alleys or doorways. Some crawled into wagons, or crept under stairs.

Welcome to New York City, circa 1850, the city that spurred the Orphan Trains a massive migration of children now considered the foundation of American foster-care programs. Thousands of parents were lost to rampant disease. Others, while factories boomed to life with little government oversight, died in horrible workplace accidents. Many died fighting the Civil War. Some children were simply abandoned by parents too poor to raise them.

Lorraine Williams remembers how her stomach gnawed while she lived in a New York orphanage. "Each child was given a shallow tin pie pan to eat from. Dinner was a bowl of thin soup with vegetables in it, and we got one ladle each," she recalled in Andrea Warren's new children's book "We Rode the Orphan Trains." "I was always hungry," Williams said. But in 1926, when she was 4 years old, Williams came under the care of the Children's Aid Society, founded in 1853 by the Rev. Charles Loring Brace.

The early social services institution, which still exists today, launched a radical program to find homes across the country for New York's orphaned and abandoned children. Williams rode a train with 13 other children from New York to Kirksville, where she was legally adopted. "This was indeed the beginning," said author Andrea Warren, "of child welfare services in America." Flawed but focused Though his program was lambasted as flawed, Brace is considered by many to be the father 1 of family social welfare. "The orphan train riders were America's first documented foster children," said Mary Ellen Johnson of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America in Springdale, Ark. Brace's raw program ushered in modern day social services programs that began to emerge in the 1930s, just as the orphan trains faded away.

The plan was, from the beginning, a desperate solution to an overwhelming problem, as wave after wave of immigrants flooded New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Half a million came in 1850 alone, and within two years, the population of New York doubled. More than 35 million people left their homelands for America between 1830 and 1914. Escaping famine and war in their own countries, many arrived in the overpopulated city only to find worse conditions. With little or no money, immigrants could not afford to move west.

Far away from extended families, they clustered together with others from their native countries. Hot, overcrowded factories employed the immigrants as cheap labor, demanding long Mississippi 240 -1 Kentucky 212 RODE THE RAILS AMD WHO SENT THEM Hi) hours for little pay. There were no labor unions to protect workers' interests and no government safety inspections of the often dangerous workplaces. There was no sick leave and no insurance; no safety-net for families should workers be injured or worse, killed. By the late 1800s, more than 1.2 million of New York's poor were crowded into bleak, rundown tenements.

Even the rigorous factory jobs grew scarce. Families were left destitute and divided. By 1850, 10,000 to 30,000 children lived in orphanages or in New York's squalid streets. Many children were abandoned when out-of-work parents could no longer feed them or when they were too drunk to try. Alcohol and drug addiction, which often led to abuse, caused many children to flee their homes.

Some children worked grueling hours for pennies a day, hawking newspapers or matches on street corners, blacking shoes, opening carriage doors or carrying bundles. Others survived by begging or picking pockets. The problem grew so severe, an outcry went up among the well-to-do who considered street children a threat. Built on an ideal Charles Loring Brace, an idealistic young minister from a wealthy family, was in his 20s when he started working with the destitute in a city slum. In 1853, he established the Children's Aid Society to provide health services, food, shelter and education for the homeless waifs.

Among the first to recognize that children thrived better in homes than in institutions, he tried placing some with families in and around New York. But there were far too many. The next year, he developed a radical plan borrowed from Europe: "placing out" homeless children to families out west. Researchers say Brace romanticized what he imagined were a i UMMttwuiv 11 33,053 153 New Hampshire 136 Maine 43 Massachusetts 375 Rhode Island 340 Connecticut 1,588 New Jersey 4,977 Delaware 833 District of Columbia 172 Maryland 563 Virginia 1,634 West Virginia 149 Georgia 317 Florida 400 Organizations that placed children: Most of the children were placed by two New York agencies New York Children's Aid Society, run by the Rev. Charles Loring Brace The New York Founding Hospital, operated 1 by the Sisters of Charity organization But these organizations sent children in smaller numbers: New York Foundling Hospital New England Home for Little Wanderers New York Juvenile Asylum Chicago Home Society Minnesota Home Society Salvation Army 1 CHRIS M0STVN NEWS LEADER Learn more Books: "We Rode the Orphan Trains" and "The Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story" by Andrea Warren; "Orphan Trains to Missouri" by Michael D.

Patrick and Evelyn Trickel; "We Are a Part of History: The Story of the Orphan Trains" by Evelyn Sheets, Patrick and Trickel; "The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America" by Marilyn Irvin Holt Web: Orphan Train Heritage Society at www.orphantrain riders.com; Orphan Trains to Missouri at www.system 1997patrick.htm vice president and chief financial officer. When asked whether the company knew of Williams' connection to the hospital when it hired him, Morton said, "No, certainly not." He referred further questions to Crane. Crane said because of the time gap between when the murders allegedly took place in mid-1992 to the present, it wasn't possible to trace where victims lived at the times of then-deaths, and where surviving family members now live. "I don't know where they all were living back in mid-'92," he said of the victims. But he described them as mid-Missouri residents.

Although each victim's name and age was listed in each murder count, no hometowns were listed, a clerk with the Boone County Circuit Court's criminal division said Monday. Neosho 26 St. Louis 14 Kirksville 21 Maitland12 Maryville16 Vandalla12 Greenfield 15 Lebanon 10 The true "orphans" In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time when the industrial revolution collided with a nation that often found itself growing too quickly, there was a demographic explosion of children without parents. Some of the contributing factors: i Parents who died- Common causes: Disease outbreaks Industrial accidents Povertystarvation Parous cianJaasd Sweeping immigration spurred overpopulation in New Vurk Cnv in the 1 cnt iry Ji fAv aiu 'r il am were scarce. i -mc who )fi ft of rt ctotn rti II i' i dk ij'ii in1 i SOURCES: "ORPHAN TRAINS TO MICHAEL 0.

PATRICK. wholesome rural farm families with an abundance of fresh homegrown food on their tables. In 1854, he shuttled the first group of 46 kids to Dowagiac, where they were successfully placed. Soon, more groups were on the way. The Foundling Hospital, a Catholic institution founded in 1869, began sponsoring its own runs, called "Mercy Trains." Foundling children were usually sent to predetermined homes selected by a priest.

At the peak of the programs, children a year traveled west. Children were gathered from the streets, jails and eventually, the hundreds of orphanages Hi lb1" 'VT. 4 Jwiinwu. ii.i i i i it' i mfk ii i THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WHO The riders "Orphan Train" is something of a misnomer. Not all the children were truly orphans.

Many had one or even two living parents or lived with other family members. In many of those cases, the child's parents believed their children would have a better life if sent to a caring Children wait family in the farmlands of the West. Many were immigrants who were accustomed to being separated from their children who found life in America harsh and could not EVELYN 000DRICH TRICKEL; NEWS-LEADER RESEARCH that sprang up in New York, Boston and other eastern cities. In New York alone, more than 90 orphanages with names like New York Home for Friendless Boys, Brooklyn Benevolent Society, and Home for Destitute Children sponsored trains. The Children's Aid Society, and later, the New York Foundling Hospital, had the largest and most reliable programs.

"When the Children's Aid Society sponsored a train, there were a lot of checks and balances," Warren said. Brace and other early social workers were well-meaning, say researchers, but the results were varied. Placing out was widely criticized as providing But the exhumation and autopsies of 13 people in 1993 failed to determine causes of death. Veterans' agents began another review of the deaths in 2001 by performing new tests on tissue specimens gathered during the earlier investigation. In a report last month, the National Medical Services laboratory determined that succinylcholine was present in tissues from each of the 10 people tested.

Williams was the only nurse on duty on ward 4E when each of those 10 people died, according to court documents filed by Wayne Kessler, a special agent with the veterans inspector general's office. In 1998, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey awarded $450,000 to the widow of a man who died at the hospital in 1992. Laughrey ruled that the hospital was negligent in the death of l' f. A icr.

iff PATBICK-SHEETS-TRICKEL COLLECTION, TRENTON, M0. to board a train circa 1920. support their children properly. Often brothers and sisters were separated by the "adoption" process, sometimes never to see each other again. free labor to rural families and farms.

Some children reported abuse; others remember childhoods filled less with love than sweat and tears. But many, like Williams, were loved or at least well-cared for. By 1927, the Foundling Hospital stopped sending trains. The Children's Aid Society halted its runs in 1929. Changes in attitudes, new laws and more sophisticated social services made the programs obsolete.

"And the truth of it is, in part, the kids' labor wasn't needed," Warren said. "There were now laws about bringing kids across state borders. There were (new) ways to help those families, and people were healthier." Elzie Havrum because it failed to remove Williams from patient care duties. In February 2000, a federal appeals court in St. Louis upheld a ruling in the Havrum case that the hospital was negligent for allowing Williams who was already suspected in patient deaths to continue caring for patients.

But Crane said at the time that there was no basis yet for prosecuting Williams. The new toxicological tests confirmed what investigators had long suspected, Crane said. "It was something that got more geared up at some times rather than others," Crane said of the years-long probe. "Nobody gave up." Williams has worked the past 18 months as a low-level accounting clerk at Panera Bread Co. in Richmond Heights, said Bill Morton, Panera's executive Families of patients who mysteriously died now seek answers Deaths, from page 1A Williams' care.

His death is one for which Williams now faces murder charges. "It's not a very happy day," Frances Gilmore said in an interview with The Associated Press. "When five years passed, I thought it was over. Now I hope we get justice." Other relatives said information was just as welcome as justice. "It's been quite a while.

Some of us had given up. Now I hope they get some answers for us," said Charles Rupard, 78, step-son-in-law of Milton Fox, whose May 26, 1992, death is now included in the murder charges. A previous investigation by the FBI and the Office of Inspector General in the veterans department determined that 41 people died on Ward 4E of the Forty suspicious deaths occurred at Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital in 1992. Officials used technology not available then to build a case leading to charges against a former nurse in 10 of the deaths. hospital between May and Au- likely to die while Williams was gust 1992 while Williams was on working as a registered nurse duty.

Investigators concluded than while 11 other nurses were patients were 20 times more on duty..