(The following story by William Johnson appeared on The (Opelousas) Daily World website on July 13.)
OPELOUSAS, La. — The largest gathering of Orphan Train riders and their families in the nation’s history is expected this weekend when the Louisiana Orphan Train Society hosts its annual gathering.
“We are expecting more than 200 people if our count is right,” said Flo Inhern, the society’s historian.
She said the event, which has been held each year since 1990, usually attracts about 80 to 90 but this year is special.
“We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the first Orphan Train riders to Louisiana in 1907,” Inhern said. “We are expecting a lot of family members this year.”
She said three Orphan Trains arrived that year; two in April and another in May. Opelousas Mayor Donald Cravins Sr. has marked the anniversary by declaring this the year of the Orphan Train Rider in Opelousas.
Inhern said she will have a display of Orphan Train memorabilia at the hall and the society will sell limited-edition prints of renowned area muralist Robert Dafford’s wall-sized painting of the arrival of the first train.
The gathering is only one of a number of events planned to mark this centennial year.
In September, the city is expected to open bids to build a permanent Orphan Train Museum in the restored Union Pacific Depot in Le Vieux Village, the city’s tourism center.
Inhern said in October the spirits of some of the riders will be brought to life again during the city’s Voices of the Past St. Landry Cemetery Tours. “There are 12 buried there that we know about,” Inhern said.
In November a newly commissioned play telling the story of the Orphan Train riders will be presented at both the Old City Market in Opelousas and on the campus of the Louisiana State University at Eunice.
The Orphan Train is the popular name for an adoption program that was begun in 1854 by the New York Foundling Hospital. New York was then experiencing a huge wave of immigrants – many the poorest of the poor.
Because of poverty, disease and economic distress, many of their children became orphans and many ended up at the Foundling Hospital.
In an effort to fight overcrowding, the Catholic hospital began the nation’s first foster care program by shipping the orphans out by the train-load to be adopted by rural Catholic families throughout the nation.
This program proved so successful that Catholic orphanages throughout the northeast soon joined in.
Between 1854 and 1929 more than 150,000 orphans, with numbers pinned to their clothes and accompanied by nuns, boarded trains for new homes in rural farming communities.
More than 2,000 of these orphans came to Louisiana, primarily to St. Landry and Evangeline parishes.
In Louisiana, Inhern said the trains would arrive in Hammond and then move on to Lafayette and points west, eventually crossing the Sabine River and continue on into Texas.
“From Lafayette they would come up to Opelousas,” Inhern said.
While about 55 orphans arrived in Opelousas in 1907, most moved on yet again.
The plan was to place them with rural farming families, so, while their new parents would pick them up at the Opelousas depot, they would take their new children home to Mamou, Eunice and other areas.
“Three went to Eunice that we know of,” Inhern said.
The trains continued to arrive every year until 1929. “That is when social services kicked in. There were no more Orphan Trains after that,” Inhern said.
The local Orphan Train Society is made up of decedents of these original riders. In Inhern’s case, the rider was her father in-law.