“I was so privileged to have been able to interview them.” “When I began this book there were 150 living riders of orphan trains, and now there are fewer than five,” said Kline. Kline is aware of all this because she interviewed surviving orphan train riders - and just in time. They didn’t know that they were going to the middle of nowhere.” They didn’t know they were likely going to be indentured servants.
They didn’t know they were going to be randomly selected by a family. “They didn’t know they were going to be put on a train. “They were told only that ‘You’re going to a family that will love you,’ ” said Kline. “The rest were abandoned children, runaways and children taken from their homes.”Ĭhildren placed on trains knew little about their fate. Only about 30 percent of train riders were orphans,” said Kline. But, only healthy children were taken to new homes, because often the children were to be used as indentured servants.Īnd not all of the children were orphans. The fact is that at any given moment during the period in which orphan trains brought children west, thousands of children lived on the streets of New York, in various levels of health. “I wanted it to give an accurate look at what it would have been like to be a rider on an orphan train.” “My novel is obviously fiction, but it was very important to me that it be historically accurate,” Kline told her Palace audience. So, reading about what Kline called “the largest single migration of children in our nation’s history” likely was the first time most readers had ever heard about a phenomenon that continued for 75 years - from 1854 to 1929. Kline believes that one of the reasons her novel about the real-life orphan trains that decades ago carried children from the streets of New York City to the more rural roads of communities in the west has sold more than a million copies is because the story is so seldom told by history books or documentaries. I’ve had a lot of community reads and a lot of campus reads, and it has struck a chord in a way that my other novels haven’t.” The talk was one of three she gave during her stop in Canton as part of One Book programming.
“This book has been such an interesting journey for me,” said Christina Baker Kline in her lecture Tuesday night at the Palace Theatre. The author of this year’s One Book One Community literacy program’s featured book, “Orphan Train,” said she felt privileged to be helping to raise the awareness of the public about the subject of her novel.
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