yesterdaysprint:

The Wyandott Herald, Kansas, January 7, 1897

New York should be prevented from unloading her scum on our people.

From the Wikipedia article on orphan trains:

The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported orphaned and homeless children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating about 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, or homeless children.

Three charitable institutions, Children’s Village (founded 1851 by 24 philanthropists), the Children’s Aid Society (established 1853 by Charles Loring Brace) and later, the New York Foundling Hospital, endeavored to help these children. The two institutions developed a program that placed homeless, orphaned, and abandoned city children, who numbered an estimated 30,000 in New York City alone in the 1850s, in foster homes throughout the country. The children were transported to their new homes on trains that were labeled “orphan trains” or “baby trains”. This relocation of children ended in the 1920s with the beginning of organized foster care in America.

While the Boston plan had allowed for children to be taken on as “indentured servants”, this was not an acceptable option for Brace. His “family plan” anticipated that families should provide for the “orphans” with the same food, clothing, education, spiritual training, etc. that they would for their own biological children. Sometimes this happened, sometimes it didn’t.