The Orphan Trains

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Eighty years ago, Elliot Bobo was taken from his alcoholic father's home, given a small cardboard suitcase, and put on board an "orphan train" bound for Arkansas. Bobo never saw his father again. He was one of tens of thousands of neglected and orphaned children who roamed the streets of New York in search of money, food, and shelter. Beginning in 1853 a young minister named Charles Loring Brace founded the Children's Aid Society - an organization that sent orphans west to begin new lives with farm families. His program would turn out to be a forerunner of modern foster care. But as The Orphan Trains, from the PBS American Experience collection, so poignantly reveals, even those for whom the journey ultimately was a triumph found the transition from one life to another almost always painful, confusing, or more difficult than one might imagine.