Featured Project

Interview with Research Associate Alison Moore

12/5/08

Alison Moore is a Research Fellow at the Humanities Institute, where she is researching the orphan trains that placed orphaned and surrendered children from New York throughout the United States in the mid- 19th and early 20th centuries. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and is currently working on an historical novel and outreach program about the orphan train riders. She recently sat down for a conversation about her work with Humanities Institute Program Coordinator, Gretchen Abbott.

Tell me a little bit about your background.

I call myself an itinerant writer of fiction and an itinerant performer. I don’t have an orphan train rider in my family, but I feel as if I should because I seem to have this genetic disposition for relocation and the exploration that comes out of that, the vulnerability. People ask me where I was born, where I am from, and I say I was born in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, but I only spent two years there. You know I’ve lived all over this country. I’ve traveled all over the world. And I am really interested in Texas! It’s odd. I’ve been to places like Indonesia and I’ve written non-fiction articles about exotic places, but to me when I discovered the Big Bend area of Texas I thought that this is about as exotic as I need to get.

I regard myself as intuitive rather than academic. I had a very unconventional education. I left home at sixteen and was living in New York. I went to a peculiar high school that was designed strictly for kids who worked, mostly for kids who were in the theater —because I had a full time job. I never finished my undergraduate degree. I studied poetry and ended up moving to San Francisco. I lived in Saudi Arabia for a few years. I lived in Tucson for a long time and then stumbled into a low-residency MFA program. And they accepted me without an undergraduate degree! So I got this MFA and suddenly had my first book published [Small Spaces Between Emergencies, 1993], which was my MFA thesis, and there I was teaching. That was never my goal. I didn’t go get an MFA degree so that I could teach. I have fallen into things — I don’t regard them strictly as falling, I think there’s been interesting intersections in my life —and I think the way that the orphan trains have come into my life is one of those. My father rode the rails as a hobo when he was in his teens, he rode from Virginia down into New Orleans and lived in the French Quarter and wrote poetry. He lived in hobo camps from a very young age. So that’s where those genes come from! I’m going to write a memoir one of these days (laughs).

Tell me more about the background of the orphan trains. How did they begin?

In 1853, Charles Loring Brace, a young minister, came to New York and was shocked at how many homeless children there were living on the streets. These were the peak immigration years — this was the time of the Irish Potato Famine —and all of this was contributing to the overcrowding and the lack of services and the prevalence of disease. So he realized that no one was doing anything about these homeless children. The orphanages were overcrowded, not because there were so many orphans, but because they were full of surrendered children who were given up by parents who were deemed unfit to care for them or unable financially to care for them. Brace thought —and part of his thinking was tied into the fact that he was a Darwinist—he believed that environment was key to a child’s development and that if you got these children out of a bad situation in New York and into, he thought, the clean, hardworking, Christian heartland, that they would have a chance. It wasn’t hard for him to make a case to private philanthropists to fund this because a one-way ticket was so much cheaper than these children being wards of the state and growing up to be hardened criminals, which is what everybody thought a lot of them would be. So he got this funded by foundations, private philanthropists, and started placing children out in 1854. He would send agents out ahead of time, who would go to towns along the rail line and they would distribute handbills, saying “friendless children — come and see them”with a date posted. And the train would come and the children would be told the night before that they were going west. They were given a bible, a little suitcase, and a new suit of clothes and they would go. Siblings were separated in the line-ups and this was the hardest thing about it, I think. They didn’t take girls over twelve because they figured that they would be streetwise after that age. They didn’t take boys beyond about fifteen because you had to turn them loose when they were eighteen by law so they wanted people to be able to get several years of work out of them at least.

Did the families legally adopt them?

Most of them weren’t legally adopted, no. It wasn’t very common back then. They were just taken in. Some of them were taken in by childless couples who were really grateful to have a child. Some were strictly used as workers and slept in the barn, never went to school, weren’t a part of the family. There’s a whole spectrum, the same as you would find in foster care today. This was the original foster care experiment.

How did you become interested in the orphan trains personally?

The two words together haunted me when I first heard them. I had no idea what it was about. I was teaching creative writing at the University of Arizona and one of my graduate students asked me if I had heard of the orphan trains. And it was like a sort of chill went up my spine. I said, “No, what is that?”and she said, “You need to know about this. I just saw a documentary on PBS.”She briefly described what it was about and it was like this light going off because at the time I was starting to write a novel where I had an elderly man who comes across a homeless boy and I thought, “Well, this is the man’s background. This is why he is drawn to this child — what evokes his whole past.”So I knew that much and I filed it away for future reference. In the meantime, I traveled to Texas and went to the Kerrville Folk Festival for the first time and I met my husband, Phil, and I asked him if he had ever heard of the orphan trains and he had not. We ended up going back to Fayetteville, Arkansas where he lived for that summer and we got the documentary, watched it, and were just completely blown away. I knew I wanted to write about it, he suggested that we try collaborating on some songs. We didn’t know very much about it at this point, but the documentary was made up of archival photographs —some of which we now use in our program —and interviews with survivors. After I went back to Tucson in the fall to teach, I got a call from Phil after I’d written a short story about it. He said, “You’ll never guess what. I’m going to get to ride on an orphan train!”I said, “What are you talking about? Not without me, you’re not going on an orphan train!”He said, this friend of mine, when he heard the song that we wrote, said, “You’ve got to go up to Springdale and meet Mary Ellen Johnson. She’s got something to do with these orphan trains, you need to meet her. Well, Springdale, Arkansas was five miles up the road from where he lived and he meets Mary Ellen Johnson who is the founder of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America right there in her little office. He sat down for her and played the song and she said, “I need you on my train! We’re doing a reenactment on Friday. We’re going to have twenty-two kids dressed up in period costume and we’re going to travel from Springdale to Van Buren, Arkansas where there’s an old opera house that’s just been renovated and we’re going to put the kids on the stage and have people choose them.”So, I’ve got basically two days to get it together to get myself back to Arkansas, to rent a costume, to get a ticket. You know, it was just one of these strange, serendipitous things. And we played music on that train as it rolled down the tracks and met some of the surviving orphan train riders, some of whom we’d seen in the documentary. It was just an incredibly moving experience. You know, to actually be able to meet them and talk with them and play our songs for them. Then we were invited to an orphan train reunion in Missouri where I read the story for the first time and we played the music —that was the crux of our original program. But we realized that we were just preaching to the choir and what we needed to do was to take the word out to people. And it just struck us that libraries and museums were the natural place for that. So we developed this program as outreach for the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America You know, the scope of the orphan trains was just incredible….76 years, 250,000 children, and it’s not in the history books.

Tell me about the outreach program about the orphan trains that you developed. I know it’s evolved considerably since then.

It’s a multi-media presentation. We have a backdrop of archival photographs and film footage that is silent while we are playing the music and in the brief gaps between songs, there is brief audio from the film. Then when we finish the second song, then there’s two interviews with surviving orphan train riders who are no longer alive. Then I do a dramatic recitation, more like a “reader’s theater”kind of thing. I recite the piece that I wrote and then we do an exposé at the end, the history, how it happened, why, and then we engage with the audience and their questions.

How many years have you been doing this at this point?

Ten years. First in Arkansas and then for the last four years through Humanities Texas. But we’ve done it in other places as well. We went to Tucson, Missouri, New Mexico…the orphan train went to every state. We perform it at museums and libraries. Right now, because of budget cuts with Humanities Texas, we’re only able to do half as many programs as they had projected for us in the fall. We’re still reeling from it. So we’re now calling places directly to see what we can do.

And the program as it stands now covers the national scope of the orphan trains or just Texas?

The orphans were transported on any passenger train —there wasn’t just one train. Certainly, when we do the program in Texas, and that’s where we’ve been doing it the most lately, I focus it on Texas. Part of the research that I’m doing right now is finding out which factors contributed to Texas being the last state that allowed orphan trains to come across its borders.

And what are you finding?

A lot of it has to do with what was considered “the west”during the time that this was happening. The orphan trains started in 1854 and went until 1929 and the peak years were around the turn-of-the-century. There were a lot of migrant workers in Texas coming to do the wheat harvests and, the thing about the orphan trains, was that you didn’t have to pay the orphans anything. Homesteaders could get more land through land grants if they had larger families, especially during the last land rush in the Oklahoma panhandle. And I’m still mystified what it was about Texas that allowed them to continue to bring in orphans when other states had already closed their doors. Kansas, for example, had decided that they didn’t want New York dumping their unwanted children on them —they were going to charge a $5000 bond for each child that was brought over. And I’m thinking that Texas was used to immigration from the get go. One of the things that I want to look into is the exhibit on immigration at the Bob Bullock Museum, which focuses on immigration up through Galveston, because that’s the way a lot of these children came. Rather than coming from the northeast, they were sailing into Galveston and then getting put on trains.

What led to the decline of the Orphan Trains? It sounds like Texas became involved at the tail end of the “experiment.”

Yes, although, some kids came to Texas as early as the late 1800s. The orphan trains in Texas were strongly influenced by the development of the railroads in the state. The first rails were in Galveston. Around 1870, that’s all there was. And it wasn’t until the 1890s when you start seeing rail lines in Dallas/Fort Worth and then out to the panhandle and other places. But the orphan trains were controversial from the get-go because you couldn’t control it. I don’t think Charles Loring Brace had any idea when he started how popular this was going to be, that it was going to involve so many children. It was never intended to supply a free labor force in the way that the system was abused. For example, in Ohio, there was a glass factory that solicited trainloads of boys to come out there and work. So more and more things like that happened and states like Kansas, you know, were getting very suspicious about “foreigners”as they called them, “street arabs.”There was a great mistrust of anything coming from New York. And then legislation was in the wings in 1929 about the time that the trains stopped —the first Aid to Families with Dependent Children was around 1930. People no longer had to surrender their children because there was finally government aid to help.

How many children do you think actually came to Texas?

I have discovered through the Orphan Train Heritage Society’s incomplete lists about 1200 names, but I would say that it is at least two or three times that.

You seem to feel a strong sense of urgency about this project. Why is that?

As my husband says, when we started this ten years ago, we were aware that it was the eleventh hour and now it’s five minutes to midnight in the sense that we used to go to orphan train reunions and meet riders themselves. Now we find their children and grandchildren who are desperately trying to solve mysteries in their family tree. I think one of the great tragedies is that, even though this affected so many people, the story is not very well known. It’s a part of our heritage, part of our history, and a part of how we have regarded the urban poor and the less fortunate. And what we thought could be done with them. It may be too late now for the orphan train riders themselves who are still alive to be granted the dignity of inclusion in history. The orphan train riders we’ve met and talked to — they were very clear about the fact that they did not want to be forgotten. They went quietly into the interior of this country and they disappeared into lonely farms and little towns and led quiet lives. And they’ve quietly died along with this tremendous story. You know, everywhere we go, people are still shocked to hear about it. So I personally feel driven to try to give voice to those that could no longer speak about it.

Besides reuniting families and bringing orphan train survivors together, what are the goals of the Orphan Train Heritage Society?

Well, they have the archives. Mary Ellen Johnson, the person who started the Society, was a humble librarian who came across a little story on microfiche about a train that had come to Rogers, Arkansas. She started out by writing two hundred letters to newspaper editors across the country asking for information about the Orphan Trains and, let me tell you, she got a lot of letters. That’s incidentally one of the things I want to do — visit some of the towns where I know orphan train riders got off and look for those newspaper articles. So she put together a reunion and the term “Orphan Train Riders”is something she coined. It sounds like such a simple thing, but these people started calling themselves “orphan train riders”and it gave them a sense of identity and belonging to something after being so isolated for so long. So, one of the other things that the society does is publish volumes — they’ve got six or seven now— called Orphan Train Riders: Their Own Stories. These aren’t available in any bookstores, you can only buy them through the Society. These are the personal accounts of the orphan train survivors. The reason that I am writing a novel is that in all my readings of these accounts…it’s like what Toni Morrison found when she read slave narratives. They are so devoid of what I imagine was the emotional impact in most cases. History has to leave out what is in-between the lines and fiction writers get to put it back in.

Tell me more about your novel.

Well, it keeps getting interrupted [laughs] but it’s about two children, one who is a native New Yorker living with his father in a hotel. His father is an Egyptologist and basically abandons his son to go off to work on the Tutankhamen digs. The other is an Irish girl who has come to America on the boat to join her father, who has sent for her. Something happens to him and he is not there to meet her. And the two of them end up on the train — he’s eleven, she’s twelve—and through fairly simple but intense circumstances that happen during the selection process, she is picked by a family and he isn’t. He’s not able to forget her, I think, and in a way, she is like his sister, but more than that. He spends a lot of time not being able to stop thinking about her after he goes to Texas and ends up down in Terlingua, where they were mining for quicksilver. The story is about what happens to them after they get off the train and how they find each other late in their lives at an orphan train reunion. It’s a collage of things — narratives, letters, interviews—that are all fictional. For example, Elizabeth becomes involved in the federal theater project and creates a living newspaper in Clifton, AZ— that’s why I was so excited about meeting the coordinator for the Humanities Institute’s living newspaper program! So it covers a lot of ground and time, but with big gaps. I want to have this overlay of her granddaughter trying to find out who she was, because her grandmother actually gave up her daughter too. This is an interesting thing I’ve found in my research, that although many orphan train riders, when they had their own families, were very devoted to them, there were a couple of cases where they surrendered their own children who ended up going out on another orphan train. So I’m kind of playing with that, I guess.

I chose to set my story in the Southwest because there is a larger story of immigration and exile that took place in these states. On the one hand you’ve got these children being moved in and on the other you’ve got Mexicans being moved out. Most people don’t know that in 1931 there were several hundred thousand Mexican Americans who had been living here long enough to qualify for citizenship, but who were shipped out. I’m interested in this influx and outflow and how those stories create the character of a state.

Can you describe the work that you are doing here at the University as a Research Associate and how that’s fitting in with your novel and your broader work on the orphan trains?

Well, they are kind of inseparable. For instance, the Harry Ransom Center has a wonderful set of photographs of the Chisos Mining Company —that whole area was supplying quicksilver during World War I, but it had to be transported by mule train because of where it was. There were photographs of all of this. So I was able to put in the kinds of details in that chapter that I just never would have had access to otherwise. I went to the Center for American History and found information about Clifton, Arizona, which is where the character of Elizabeth goes — again photographs and there were some diaries. Wonderful stuff. There are also great old books and maps of the railroads. What the research is helping me with is the context of the time period. I have never written an historical novel in my life and if you’d told me ten years ago that I would be doing this I would have said you were out of your mind. I have become a student of history and I never would have thought that this would be me. I was raised in the ’60s and I only read stuff of my generation and that’s just all changed now . I’m just so excited to be learning how to do this. This is as much a part of making a book as the writing itself. It’s an extremely pleasurable aspect of the writing process.

How did you find about the RA program?

I was a Dobie Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin last year and someone at the graduate college encouraged me to look into the Humanities Institute because I was trying to find possible way to extend my library privileges. I was just feeling bereft that this was coming to an end when I felt like I was just getting started. It was during that time period that my project had changed from being a novel into a historical novel. I was so excited to be able to apply! The thing is, and this is what is hard about balancing my work on the orphan train performance and also being a writer, is that I have to do the traveling in order to make my living. Coming to Texas and getting to know UT sort of from the outside, not as a student but as a Paisano Fellow and now through this, I just feel such a connection and wanting to see how far I could go with this research. But I find it significant that I wound up in Texas, that I moved here. I’m very interested in the particular part that Texas had to play in the orphan trains because maybe they had more tolerance, maybe more empathy for this. I’d like to think it was more than economic considerations.

I was just thinking about the surprising points of comparison that you’ve been able to make with other Research Associates, such as Dr. Nancy Rosenau, who seemed to be working on such different things and yet there turn out to be some amazing synergies.

Well, that’s the exciting thing about this program with the Humanities Institute — there’s no telling what might come out of it!