In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Eastern cities were filled with orphaned, abandoned or homeless children, with little to no social support. And so, with the idea of placing them with a family and getting them fresh air, organizations started putting kids on trains bound for the Midwest. Over 75 years, they relocated 250,000 children.
"Some people had very good experiences. Some people had very bad experiences," said Christina Baker Kline, whose novel "Orphan Train" is the featured book of Lakeville's OneBook, OneLakeville community book event. The program, which includes events tied to the book and encourages all residents to read it, culminates with a sold-out appearance by the author at the Lakeville Area Arts Center on April 26.
As Kline's fictionalized account shows, some of the children ended up exploited as free labor. Even if they didn't, the kids, often poor and from immigrant families, Kline said, sometimes struggled in the small communities.
"Some of them didn't know how to read," she said, "Some of them didn't know how to use a knife and fork." Still, she said, in the eastern cities, "there was little to no social mobility. So the truth is, most of those kids would have ended up dead, or in prison, or in prostitution."
Kline's novel, her fifth, intertwines the stories of elderly widow Vivian, who as a young Irish immigrant rode the orphan train from New York to Minnesota during the Depression, and Molly, a modern teenager in Maine close to aging out of the foster system. The book spent eight months on the New York Times bestseller list and was No. 1 for a month.
"I think that the story really resonates for people," Kline said, "in part because it's an important part of American history that's been hidden in plain sight."
As part of her research, Kline interviewed orphan train riders at reunions in Minnesota with Renée Wendinger, of Sleepy Eye, Minn., who published two books on the relocation — a pictorial history and a fictionalized account — and whose 99-year-old mother is one of the last living orphan train riders. "She didn't have a good experience," Wendinger said of her mother. "She was used for indentured labor."
"Renée was a tremendous resource," Kline said, adding that "it would have been a very different book" without the interviews. "The feelings that those train riders had when they rode, many of those feelings were still present," she said. "Many of those train riders were [able] to convey those feelings of loss and displacement so eloquently."
