Revisiting the Orphan Train: An American Odyssey

Mobituaries with Mo Rocca

iHeartPodcasts and CBS News

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 20.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Between 1854 and 1929, 250,000 orphans and abandoned children were placed on East Coast city trains and sent west to live with new families. A desperate solution to a desperate problem, some of the stories turned out well and some far from well. The remarkable stories of these riders live on through their descendants, many of whom continue to search for answers about their ancestry. Mo talks to one of these descendants and tracks down the last surviving Orphan Train rider. This episode originally aired on December 20, 2019.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Now streaming on Paramount Plus.
0:02.2	This is Dr. Frazier Crane.
0:03.7	I'm listening.
0:04.7	He's back again.
0:06.3	Hey dad, I got a question about punctuation.
0:08.0	Ooh!
0:09.0	No, stay on task.
0:10.0	And he's more Frazier than ever.
0:11.9	How do I look?
0:13.0	Rich.
0:14.0	Just what I was going to do.
0:15.0	Oh my God, they traded your baby for wine.
0:17.0	Do you really think we would trade John for white Zinfandel?
0:21.0	Or any wine.
0:24.0	Frazier, new season now streaming on Paramount Plus.
0:28.0	Hi, it's Mo.
0:32.0	We're off through the new year, but I wanted to share another one of my favorite
0:36.8	stories with you before we return with our final episode of the season. It's about the largely forgotten social experiment known as the orphan train
0:46.4	movement. From 1854 to 1929, more than a quarter million abandoned or orphaned children were placed on trains taking
0:57.4	them from East Coast cities to the Midwest and beyond to live with new families, the largest mass migration of
1:05.9	children in American history. Today two million Americans are descendants of
1:12.2	these courageous riders. In 2019 we looked back at
	...

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