ORPHAN TRAINS – The Whole Story

The ORPHAN TRAINS weren’t at all about what we Americans were all told they were about. These weren’t babies and young children “being rescued or saved”; these were babies and children who were abducted and taken from their parents, transported hundreds and thousands of miles from their homes, and forced into labor camps and forced bid adoptions nationwide. The ungodly Orphan Train effort to redistribute the children of parents who had been forced into Insane Asylums in the late 1800’s/early 19oo’s, who were deemed/diagnosed as “Delusional”, after witnessing the most horrific events in all of American history, were carried out by the same families who are still terrorizing the USA and the rest of the world – the MoneyChangers – the Central Banker families.

More than 250,000 children were abducted and forced onto trains, dubbed the Orphan Trains, to be transported across the nation, to all 50 states, to be “adopted” by families these children had never met, and used as Child Labor by oftentimes unprincipled companies.

Sebastopol, California was a regular destination for these Child Slave Laborers, as this article establishes, using newspaper clippings from 1910. The Barlow Ranch used Child Labor for many years, and when the children would escape, the Barlow Family put a $10 bounty out for their capture. More articles about Sebastopol’s association with the Boys and Girls Aid Society found here:

https://comstockhousehistory.blogspot.com/2014/02/sebastopols-child-labor-camps.html

More than one hundred of the boys who are gathering the crops of berries at the Barlow berry fields came over on an electric train Friday morning to enjoy the circus. They were accompanied by Superintendent Frank C. Turner and enjoyed a splendid day’s outing. The lads marched up Sebastopol avenue behind their drum corps and attracted much attention by their manly bearing and military precision. – Santa Rosa Republican, September 2, 1910

From the Substack article: The children were from “The Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society,” a San Francisco institution for boys “not sufficiently wayward to require assignment to the reform school, and too hard to manage to be placed in family homes or orphanage.” (In 1907, two Santa Rosa kids were sent there for repeatedly stealing chickens.) Their summer destination was on the Barlow ranch outside of Sebastopol, near the current location of Taft Street Winery off of Occidental Road. Between 100 and 200 boys – and it was always only boys, some as young as seven – had been coming up here since 1902.

Both Santa Rosa newspapers were enthusiastic about the program, and fluffy stories about it were also popular “evergreens” in the Bay Area dailies and regional magazines (see Sunset Magazine: “Berries and Character,” 1906). What’s not to like about reading that bad boys were being reformed by spending summers in the country? And their days spent here surely were among the happier childhood memories for the boys, who otherwise would be training at the Aid Society for a lifetime of factory or machine shop work. Then why were they always trying to escape?

The Sebastopol newspaper reported there were “only a few attempts to get away” in 1910, which was apparently less than the dozen or so who tried to flee in 1908. Escape was not easy, despite the campground living situation; not only did the boys have their clothes taken away from them at night and locked up, but there was a $10 bounty on runaways – the equivalent of almost a week’s wages for the average Santa Rosa household – so the community was always alert for escapees.

When there were serious incidents with escapees, the local press ignored or downplayed it. In 1910 the Santa Rosa papers didn’t mention the dramatic story of 15 year-old Albert Sheuger, who escaped from the Barlow camp and made his way back to Oakland, where he committed nine burglaries in two weeks. (In one of the first robberies he discovered a suitcase filled with patent medicine, and thereafter pretended to be a door-to-door salesman if anyone answered his knock.) In 1905, the Press Democrat reported three boys gave an overweight policeman quite a workout as he chased them through the brush on the banks of Santa Rosa Creek. But no mention appeared in the PD that one of them, 14 year-old Ray Riley, escaped again and made it to a relative’s home in Santa Clara county. His family members testified in court that he showed up with his back, arms, and legs all bruised purple from allegedly being whipped with a strap following the earlier getaway.

Aside from looking for escapees wearing only nightshirts or ill-fitting garments snatched off a clothesline, “the boys’ hands will be found scratched and stained from the berries,” the PD helpfully tipped off would-be bounty hunters in 1907. A close look at the photo shown at right indeed reveals their fingers were so stained as to appear dipped in paint. Which brings up a central question: How much berry picking were they doing on the Barlow ranch, anyway?

The Barlow family had 100 acres in loganberries and blackberries (making it the largest blackberry patch in the state) but even that wasn’t enough to keep a hundred or more boys busy for a full summer. As mentioned in a previous article, the program kept expanding, with “the Aid” bringing up more and more youths. In 1907, they had worked for the Barlows and two neighbors, picking 125 tons of berries. The following year they were hired out to 22 growers between Sebastopol and Forestville and picked 157 tons, plus “many tons” of peaches and plums. So popular were the child workers that still more farmers were planning to take advantage of the boys and not hire adults. One of the Santa Rosa papers reported, “arrangements are now being made for next year’s picking by several who have heretofore depended on Japanese help, or any who came along.” Meanwhile, older boys from the Society were sent to work at the canneries. In essence, The Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society was operating a temp agency for child labor – and with each passing year, more farmers around Sebastopol were relying upon children for ultra-cheap field work. By 1917, a state report (more about that in a minute) found “this district has come to depend upon the large annual influx from the society.”

At the end of the season there were always articles about how much money had been earned. It usually worked out to an average of about $30 per child, or roughly $2.50 per week. Still, quite a nice handful of coin for a young person at the time.

But their paychecks were also docked for quite a large number of deductions. Money was first taken out for their lodging in the Barlow tents, food, transportation to and from Sonoma County plus salaries for supervisors and other adult staff. (We probably don’t have to guess who paid the $10 bounty for hauling escapees back to camp in handcuffs.) Once they were back at the Aid Society home in San Francisco, they were expected to use their earnings to pay for their own clothes, shoes and even dentistry.

We get a good look at how the program developed through a 1917 state report on farm labor. When there was a shortage of farm laborers during World War I, the state of California studied how well male and female urbanites would fare as substitutes. It found that adults, coaxed into seasonal farm work via promises of good wages or appeals to wartime patriotism, frequently quit or performed subpar. But although they needed more supervision, children usually did very well and sometimes outperformed experienced adult workers because they worked faster at picking crops and similar piece work. This was a significant finding because the state had just passed a wartime emergency act that could cut the school year to six months so high school kids potentially could be enlisted as farm laborers.

Those 1917 researchers found Sebastopol the ideal place to study because it had more urban youth farm workers than anywhere else, with four hundred young people in the berry fields that summer. In addition to the 158 Aid Society boys then working at the Barlow place, there were two large groups of Boy Scouts from the East Bay and two groups from Bay Area youth ecumenical clubs, presumably working from mostly patriotic motivation.

The state report found the boys from the Aid Society were least productive because “a number of the boys [were] feeble minded or crippled,” yet they ended the season with the most cash in their pockets. Part of the reason was because they were in the fields twice as long as the Boy Scouts or the other groups, twelve weeks compared to six or less. Also, the Barlows were less aggressive in making their child workers pay for their own food and lodging; one farmer, Lee Maddox, even charged the Boy Scouts working at his ranch for kitchen utensils and medical supplies. A third of the boys working on the Kinley farm technically ended the season in debt to the farmer, which was hopefully forgiven or billed to the Oakland church group that sent them there.

This 1917 report had several conclusions. The good news was that all of the farmers (except one) thought the boys did good work. But the state also found the food was sometimes “scanty” and the amount of money left to the boys after the living expense deductions was “nil or negligible.” Most damning was this conclusion: “This work is justified only as a means of financing an outing for the youngsters.”

To be fair, the Barlows and other growers probably would have been horrified if anyone suggested they were exploiting children or abetting the Aid Society to do same. Working outdoors in pleasant weather, even under guard, even being cheated on wages paid on the amount of fruit you pick was character-building and completely different from slaving away in a sweatshop being paid for the number of pieces of cloth you sew…right?

Consider, too, this was the Progressive Era in America, when attitudes about juvenile delinquency were just starting to become less rigid. By 1910 Santa Rosa had created a “Detention Home,” so youthful offenders didn’t have to be incarcerated in jail cells next to adults. Yet at the same time, San Francisco papers reported a young man named Joe King, who had been in and out of reformatories for 13 of his 20 years, was sentenced to five years in San Quentin for burglary.

A Journalist named JEFF ELLIOTT wrote the above Substack article, and also publishes “About Santa Rosa History.com“.