The Journey HomeImagine being on a train headed to a place you don't know, with hundreds of other children traveling with you. At the next stop you get off and hundreds of adults surround you. You hear them talking and mumbling but you can't understand what they are saying. Some point at you and grab your arms to see your muscles. Complete strangers come to examine you and consider adopting you, one of the train's orphaned passengers, into their homes. Orphan trains are a part of American history unknown to many. However, they had a huge impact in the passing of several laws and today's foster care system. According to Ozarks Public Television's Orphan Train documentary and the Orphan Train Depot website, between 1853 and 1929 approximately 250,000 children were moved from major cities in the East. coastal cities like New York and Boston, to new homes in the United States and Canada. Most of them moved westward to newly settled areas such as Texas and Missouri. At its peak, the orphan trains transported 3,000 to 4,000 children per year. The first shipment of forty-two children was sent in 1854 to Michigan. They were all six years old or older and were adopted by farmers who used them to pick apples. These children became the first documented foster children in the United States. There were two large societies that helped with orphan trains, the Children's Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital. The Reverend Charles Lauren Brace founded the Children's Aid Society in 1853 in hopes of taking in homeless children and teaching them skills to find them jobs. Subsequently he began to place the children in the countryside with new families. According to the article "Baby Trains" by Dianne Creagh, Sister Mary Irene founded... middle of the paper... eighteen years old and is purged from the system. There are not enough social workers for all the children in the system, and sometimes it simply becomes impossible to care for all the children without forgetting some. Even though this happens less and less, it still happens. The Orphan Trains represent an unknown period in American history when children were taken from urban centers and shipped west to start a new life. Many children had one or more parents still alive, but their parents could not afford to care for them. The brothers separated and often never saw each other again. Some children found loving families, but others were mistreated and treated like slaves. The difficulties children faced helped shape child welfare laws and regulations, labor laws, and adoption laws. It had its biggest impact on the foster care system and how it works today.