Dennis Wilson, of Mason City, got a first-hand introduction to one of the thousands of children who came west on an Orphan Train when he was a student in a one-room country school house.

That former orphan, by then well into her senior years, was an eye-opener.

“We could not imagine a life without two parents,” he said. “We were so excited, we were going to see an orphan.”

Wilson shared the research he did on the Orphan Trains with more than 90 people Thursday afternoon at the weekly Brown Bag Briefing at the Fort Dodge Public Library.

Between 1854 and 1929, more than 300,000 children were moved from crowded East Coast cities, primarily New York City, to new families in the West.

Most sources list the number who landed with families in Iowa at about 10,000.

Wilson’s research indicates it was more than that.

“I’m inclined to think it’s double that,” he said.

Some of those orphans were adopted off the trains only a few blocks from where Wilson was speaking. Orphan Trains made seven stops in Fort Dodge from 1886 to 1912.

The orphans were a product of social conditions and changes beyond their control. New York City’s population went from about 942,000 in 1870 to 3.4 million in 1910. Much of this was due to immigrants flooding into the city and people moving from rural to urban areas for work. The effects of the economic depression that followed the Civil War also took a toll.

“Why did this happen?” he asked. “It was basically overpopulation.”

Conditions for a child in New York and other eastern cities during this time period were horrible.

“You would have an apartment made for five or six people,” he said. “And there’s 30 people in there.”

Basic sanitation was absent. People got their water from a pump in the street. Full chamber pots were emptied in the gutter or out the window. Back alleys contained outhouses and the thousands of horses used in the city took care of filling the streets.

Disease, poverty, violence, alcoholism, prostitution and political corruption were part of everyday life.

Child labor was common. Children were often injured or killed while working 12 to 14 hours a day.

An abandoned infant or, as they were called, a foundling, had the worst odds of all.

“A baby found in the street had a zero chance of survival there,” Wilson said. “In 1854, 30,000 kids were running the streets of New York.”

In 1853, Charles Loring Brace founded the New York Children Aid Society.

“He started the Orphan Train movement,” Wilson said. “The first train went to Michigan, then the Midwest and the South.”

Brace had a simple philosophy.

“He believed every individual can make a difference,” Wilson said. “Educate him, give him a faith in God and give him a marketable job skill.”

Sometimes the Orphan Trains were met with criticism.

“Not everybody was in favor of the Orphan Trains,” he said.

Some were concerned the children were being kidnapped.

“Were they?” Wilson asked. “Some say they were.”

It also caused controversy over the issue of faith.

“Most of the children were primarily Catholic and Jewish,” he said. “People were saying, ‘You’re taking Catholic and Jewish kids out and making Protestants out of them.”

In addition, there were concerns about the children being used as free labor and abused physically and sexually.

“Yes,” he said, “that happened. How many, nobody knows. My best guess is about 30 percent.”

There were arguments in favor of the trains.

“It gives the kids a chance,” he said. “Those that got a ride on the Orphan Train got a new lease on life.”

Once a train arrived in a community, the process of getting the children to a family seemed almost barbaric by modern standards.

“They would line them up,” Wilson said. “Those that had made applications got first bid.”

They weren’t always highly thought of or welcomed.

“One local paper had an article where they wrote the children were, ‘disposed of in just a matter of minutes,'” he said.

Even the donation made to the organizations that brought them west was often misinterpreted.

“It cost about $8 to send a kid from New York to here,” Wilson said. “That was often seen as paying for the kid.”

Some children were lucky to be placed at all. At the time, there was apparently a strong prejudice against certain hair colors.

“Red hair,” he said. “Especially a girl with red hair, they couldn’t give them away. They would dye their hair.”

If a child had not been placed by the end of the trip, the ending wasn’t usually happy.

“If they aren’t taken they go back to New York.” he said.

Wilson is concerned that the story of the Orphan Trains isn’t taught in school.

“We’re working to try to get it included in the school curriculum,” he said. “The Orphan Train brings to us a realization that children suffered then and that they’re suffering today. We have not come too far. I see it in the faces of the kids I talk to today.”

A child living on the streets of New York once told the photographer Jacob Riis, when Riis asked him where he lived, “I don’t live nowhere.”

“There are children today that will say the same thing,” Wilson said. “The growth of our children and how they’re treated is important.”