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synopsis • filmmaker's viewpoint • funders
Synopsis
Color, 15 minutes, 16mm
English
Student thesis film, Harvard University, 1992
"Just before dropping us off at the orphanage, my mother took my brothers and me to see Howe Caverns in upstate New York, " says Alice Bullis Ayler, 72. She remembers the joyful boat ride up the Hudson River in stark contrast to the ensuing trauma, when her mother abandoned Alice in one orphanage, and her younger twin brothers in a separate orphanage. "The twins were literally torn out of my arms, kicking and screaming and yelling 'Too-Too, don't go away!'"
Alice's brothers Leslie and Wesley Bullis eventually were sent on an train with a group of other orphans to Kansas, where they were adopted by a farm family who needed help with chores. It was harder to place Alice, by then a feisty nine-year-old. She was sent on an orphan train to Kansas in 1929, moving from home to home but never getting adopted. It took years for Alice to find her brothers again.
While seemingly a quirky story of hardship and pluck, the Bullis's life was not the only one to follow this path. More than 200,000 orphans from New York City and Boston were sent by train to find homes in the Midwest. The program was organized primarily by the Children's Aid Society, whose founder Charles Loring Brace hoped "to get these children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country."
The orphan trains stopped at churches, town halls, and opera houses in small towns across the Midwest, where the children were lined up for inspection by local families. Many of the parents were farmers looking for laborers; some were childless couples thrilled to find someone to love; others were religious people hoping to do God's work by saving a child. While some of the orphan train riders remember their foster and adoptive families fondly, many experienced mental and physical abuse. The Bullis twins say, "Our adoptive parents gave us a good life. The only thing they didn't give us was love."
"Orphan Train" tells the history of this movement through photographs, mementos, and testimonials of the last survivng orphan train riders. The film is framed by the events of the 1991 Orphan Train Reunion in Springdale, Arkansas. We learn some surprising things about the way these children were treated, and also see the true strength of the human spirit.
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