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Between 1854 and 1929, up to a quarter of a million children from New York City and other Eastern cities were sent by train to towns in the Midwestern and Western states.
The orphan trains as they were later known served to remove children from slums and get them off the streets by transporting them to 'good' homes out West. Life in the rural Midwest was deemed better for the children than life in a crowded Eastern city, where epidemics of typhoid, flu, and yellow fever left many children orphaned. But not all the children were orphaned, many were simply abandoned or their parents could no longer take care of them due to poverty or illness.
Rather than placing children into the overcrowded and bleak orphanages, the Children's Aid Society placed them out of the area and in a family setting in rural America where they were to be of service to those taking them in.
This is the story of eleven year old John who was one of those children.
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