The Orphan Trains: Foundlings on the Frontier

Between 1854 and 1929 over 250,000 orphans and unwanted children were taken out of New York City and sent west to find new homes. Children were sent to every state in the continental United States up until 1929 when the last train was sent to Sulphur Springs, Texas. In 1904 a group of twenty-one Irish Catholic children came to Clifton, Arizona from the New York Foundling Hospital and the ensuing confrontation over stewardship of these children became a state and national controversy that went to the Arizona Supreme Court. This incident in racial and class conflict is a poignant illustration of the cultural disparities between the East Coast and the developing West at the turn of the last century.

This free multimedia program combines live music of Philip Lancaster and Alison Moore, video montage with archival photographs and interviews of survivors, and a dramatic reading from the 2012 novel “Riders on the Orphan Train” by award-winning author Alison Moore.