Orphans

The status of "orphan" is defined in the United States as "a minor bereft through death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents" (Wikipedia). CWRGM also applies this term to identify military orphans, or a child whose mother is still living but whose father died in military service. Orphans in the nineteenth-century often came from a variety of backgrounds and had an equal variety of experiences. While the death of both parents, usually from disease, certainly left many children orphaned, poverty remained the primary cause by which a child could be sent to live at an orphanage. The rise of industrialism in the U. S. brought about a concurrent rise in poverty, particularly in the nation's cities. Many impoverished parents either abandoned their children at orphanages or asked that orphanages take in their children to provide them with the food, shelter, medicine, and in certain cases education that working-class parents could not. Children could spend months or years in orphanages, though many forced them to return to their families or go out on their own by age 15 or 16. Most orphanages were privately owned and operated by religious or reform organizations, though some states increasingly sponsored institutional homes for orphans by the end of the nineteenth century. While the vast majority of orphanages operated in major eastern cities, the so-called "orphan train" process sent orphans by train to rural areas of the country, where reformers thought that family life and agricultural work would keep them from the moral corruption of the city. Orphans of different races, religions, and ethnicities also experienced orphanages differently, as many excluded non-white, immigrant, and Jewish orphans. Ultimately, the devastation of the Civil War and the widespread poverty of industrialism in the U. S. produced an unprecedented number of orphans, and their care became a principal cause among reformers throughout the nineteenth century (Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2, 454-6).