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distinct economic return in the reduction of the number of those who are hopeless charges upon the common purse. More money at our command means more power to extend this great opportunity of help to the many homeless children in the boys’ and girls’ lodging houses in New York, and in the asylums and institutions throughout the State. We therefore ask the public for a more liberal support of this noble charity, confident that every dollar invested will bring a double return in the best kind of help to the children, so pitifully in need of it.

    This chart, from the Children’s Aid Society’s 1910 bulletin, shows the number of children who rode the orphan trains and the states to which they were sent.
Courtesy the Children’s Aid Society
    Although there were some problems in this system of matching homeless children with foster parents, the orphan train program did what it set out to do. It gave the homeless children of New York City the chance to live much better lives.

    Three sisters who were taken in by the Children’s Aid Society after their mother had died. At the time the photograph was taken, the two youngest girls had been adopted.
Courtesy the Children’s Aid Society

New York City in the 1860s
    New York City in the 1860s was a fast-paced, crowded, and sometimes dangerous city. Almost half the population of the city had been born in another country. Most of these immigrants came from Ireland or Germany.
    The streets of New York City were full of life. Food and other items were sold in markets, and children played marbles and other outdoor games. Horse-drawn carriages clattered noisily down the bumpy streets, which were paved with cobble-stones.
    Many of the people who settled in New York City in the 1860s moved to the southern part of Manhattan. There they could be close to the factories and docks where they worked. They lived in tenements—cheaply built, overcrowded housing. People in tenements used outdoor communal toilets that often overflowed and enabled diseases like cholera to spread quickly.

    A New York City street scene.
Courtesy the Children’s Aid Society
    In fact, in 1866, the year in which
Lucy’s Wish
is set, one of the most serious epidemics of cholera in history hit New York City. There were eleven hundred deaths in 1866 alone; there were sixteen hundred deaths between 1860 and 1870. And it was usually poor immigrants, like Lucy’smother, who died from cholera, or from tuberculosis or scarlet fever.
    New York City in the 1860s was a violent place. There was tension between longtime residents and new immigrants, between the rich and the poor, and between people of different ethnic backgrounds. Immigrants were blamed for the cholera epidemic and for taking jobs from others by agreeing to work for lower wages. These tensions led to riots. There were also violent protests against the draft for the Civil War. In 1863, one of these protests turned into a terrible riot in which hundreds of New Yorkers were killed or wounded.
    There were public schools in New York City in the 1860s, but many poor and immigrant children could not attend them. There simply wasn’t room in the schools for the huge number of immigrant children, and many were turned away. Some schools operated two half-day sessions so that more children could attend. Younger children were taught arithmetic, singing, drawing, calisthenics, and English. Older students also studied science, history, and civics. There was no public high-school system in New York City at that time, so students usually stopped going to school at age fourteen.

    Two New York City children in their tenement home. Between them is a Christmas tree they have made using a broom and a bucket.
Courtesy the Children’s Aid Society

    These boys stand on a New York City street, ready to travel west and start new lives. Their placing-out agent stands behind them.
Courtesy the Children’s Aid Society
    Source:
The Encyclopedia