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MEDINA REMEMBERS ORPHAN TRAINS BARBARA COX BACON STORY


Medina remembers Orphan Trains By Meaghan M. McDermott Staff writer AIMEE K. WILES staff photographer Barbara Cox Bacon, 83, looks at her two children�s photos in a locket. She and her three siblings were placed with different families after their father died in 1928 and their mother suffered a breakdown. Between 1853 and 1929, as many as 300,000 orphans were moved from orphanages in big cities to new homes. Some children ended up in western New York. The Orleans County Genealogical Society hopes to find as many of these surviving orphans as possible to document their stories. [Day in Photos] (April 16, 2004) � On Christmas Eve 1929, 9-year-old Barbara Henderson found herself miles away from the only home she had ever known, standing in a stranger�s living room, gazing out at a gentle snow falling on the streets of Medina, Orleans County. �I stood there wondering where my sisters and brother were,� said Henderson, now 83 years old, living in Lockport, Niagara County, and known as Barbara Cox Bacon. Although she didn�t know it at the time, Bacon, as well as her two older sisters and younger brother, were riding the trailing edge of one of the largest mass migrations in the nation�s history: the Orphan Train movement. Between 1853 and 1929, passenger trains ferried up to 300,000 children such as Bacon away from big-city orphanages to new lives and new families in rural areas all across the country. Freshly bathed, wearing new clothes and carrying all their possessions in a single suitcase, orphans in small groups would disembark at train stations and line up to be inspected by nearly any local family willing to take a child home, said Judy Hill, secretary of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America Inc. Sometimes, said Hill, children would stage impromptu performances to make themselves more attractive. Holly Canham, president of the Orleans County Genealogical Society, estimated that nearly 33,000 such trains may have run through upstate New York. �But we don�t know the number of children that were aboard,� said Canham, who has so far been able to locate only two surviving former orphans who were placed locally. The last trains ran 75 years ago, and Canham worries that the stories of Orphan Train riders will be forever lost. That�s one reason for staging an Orphan Train re-enactment Saturday at the Medina Railroad Museum. �We want to encourage people who were riders or are descendants of riders to come and tell us their stories,� said Canham. �To me it was just a train� Barbara Cox Bacon, sisters Margaret and Marian and brother Billy shared a small home in Friendship, Allegany County, with their mother and father. Then on July 4, 1928, Bacon�s father was killed in a car accident, leaving her mother to raise the children alone. �She had no money, no anything,� said Bacon last week in the Lockport home she shares with her husband, Armand Bacon. �She just collapsed.� Their home life became so terrible that oldest sister Margaret went to neighbors, trying to find someone who could help them. Soon after, the children were taken to live with a local Baptist minister. But that stay was short-lived, and the four children were taken to orphanages in New York City. �We three girls were taken to the Goodhue Home, and my brother went to a farm run by Mr. Brace,� said Bacon. Mr. Brace was minister Charles Loring Brace, who in 1853 founded the Children�s Aid Society. His goal was to rescue the poor, homeless children who were wandering the streets of New York City and to place them with Christian families living in the country. �Mr. Brace believed family life was the best way for kids to develop, not living in institutional settings,� said Victor Remer, archivist for the Children�s Aid Society in New York City. While other agencies also placed children in homes by train, the Children�s Aid Society placed by far the most, an estimated 120,000, said Remer. �We�re not saying that all the placements were ideal situations,� said Hill, whose father-in-law, Charles Hill, was taken by train to a Kansas farm in 1904 or 1905. �But my father-in-law had a wonderful upbringing.� Researchers believe that more than 80 percent of the orphan train riders were successfully placed with loving foster families, Canham said. Some were later formally adopted. Bacon, who was placed by the Children�s Aid Society, remembers the terrible taste of orphanage pudding, being assigned to clean the orphanage bathrooms and being told one night shortly before Christmas 1929 that she had to go to bed early because the next day she was going to take a train ride. She does not have any strong memories of her trip aboard the Orphan Train, however. �To me it was just a train,� she said.�I wonder who my parents are� Beth Plumley of Florida, now 78, was 20 months old in the 1920s when she arrived in the Medina home of Benjamin and Elsie Cooper. While she knew she was adopted, it wasn�t until recently that Plumley learned she had been born in Rochester and had been an Orphan Train rider. The Social Security Administration would not accept her generic Children�s Aid Society birth certificate, she said. �I was so surprised,� said Plumley, a retired clerk for the Orleans County Department of Social Services. �I had heard nothing about Orphan Trains, nothing about it. I got a videotape from the public library, and the story was so enlightening.� Plumley knows about her foster family and revels in her own six children, 18 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren. But she still has lingering, unanswered questions. �How did I end up in New York, then back on a train and in Medina?� she said. �I wonder who my parents are and if there are siblings around.� Bacon�s search for answers has been more successful. Soon after her arrival in Medina, Bacon discovered that her sister Marian was living nearby with Harry Cox, a jeweler, and his wife, Elizabeth. By mutual agreement, Bacon was allowed to move in with the Coxes. While in high school, Bacon learned that her sister Margaret was living with a family in Lockport. In the 1940s, she discovered that a Massachusetts family had adopted her brother, Billy. Neither family allowed contact among the children. Locating all her siblings did not quell Bacon�s other questions about her origins. �I never knew what happened to my mother,� she said, adding that she started researching her genealogy in the 1970s. �I had always wondered, �Why did my mother abandon us?�� Later Bacon learned that her mother had a complete mental breakdown and had no choice. Through other research, she learned that members of her biological family had been judges, lawyers, legislators � successful. �I found out we weren�t just trash,� she said. �That gave me a whole new outlook on things.� Who will tell their stories? Genealogists and historians are working against time to document the journeys of the orphans, the youngest of whom are now in their 70s and 80s. �We don�t want this story forgotten,� said Canham, who has spent countless hours coordinating Medina�s Orphan Train re-enactment. �We need to document the era of history which started our modern foster care system,� Hill said. The upcoming re-enactment will feature two runs along a 34-mile round-trip route from the Medina Railroad Museum to Lockport. During the ride, an onboard public address system will carry a live discussion by Orphan Train historian and author Tom Riley. Upon returning to the railroad museum, orphans played by children from the Medina Middle School will be taken off the train and taken to a platform, where they will perform and be selected by families. Children not selected during the first train run will reboard the train and try again at the second stop, just as the original riders did, said Canham. Both Bacon and Plumley plan to attend and share their stories. �This is a part of our history,� said Bacon. �Any major movement in our history should be documented,� said Hill, whose organization hopes to become the nation�s largest repository for Orphan Train information. �These stories have to be documented before they�re all gone.� [email protected] For more information on Orphan Trains: http://iagenweb.org/iaorphans/index.htm www.orphantrainriders.com www.orleanscountygenealogicalsociety.org/

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