George Wells' Orphan Train Experience

In 1983, Mildred Bennett, founder of the WCPM, and Don Connors, interviewed George Müller Wells of nearby Cowles, Nebraska, about his childhood experience of riding the orphan train to Nebraska. What follows are George's recollections, as recorded by Bennett and lightly edited for readability.

I was born in New York City and at the age of five, my mother passed away. My father went up into Maine to find work, and he took us four children to his sister, an aunt of ours, for us to stay with her until he could find work, and so while he was gone, why she decided that she was going to put me and my youngest sister in the orphanage . . . . My youngest sister . . . she had fell and hurt her knee sometime and so they wouldn't take her. . . . so she made preparations for me, for them to get me and on the day I went to the orphanage, my aunt took me to a little stop at the elevated railroad and . . . set me in a little room that was there and said I was to stay there and someone would come along and pick me up and then she left.

The older sisters—when I was there—one was fourteen and the other was twelve. So, you see, they had kind of looked after me. I was a kind of a plaything for them. And this aunt, my father's sister, run a dyeing and cleaning establishment in New York City, and it was just about where Grand Central Station is now. The two girls was old enough that they could press clothes and could make their living. The rest of us was too young and she didn't want us around. She had three boys of her own. I was the youngest on the train. And I suppose I had to be six years old before they would take me on the train to be put in a home, so they claimed I was six. I found out afterwards that I was between five and six. My sisters told me.

After a while [at the New York station] someone evidently picked me up, and they took me to this home . . . just long enough that they fed me one meal and they got us all, the whole bunch, ready to go. So then we was put on this orphanage train, and I never did stay in the orphanage overnight. . . . On the train I run onto a little boy, his name was Billy Sheeb, and he happened to set in the same seat that I was in, and he was just two years older than I was. And so on the way out here, why we made it up that one wouldn't go anyplace without the other. . . . It took us three days and three nights to come from New York to Red Cloud, here, and they just fed us right in the seat and everything. We never got out of the seat, and we had to set right there all the time. I don't think they started to drop children off until they got to Kansas and Nebraska. We set there and slept there, and so then when we got here, why we got into Red Cloud some time real early in the morning. . . . 

We set down there at the depot 'til, oh, it must have been after dinner anyhow, and then they brought one carload of us, sixty or seventy of us anyhow, walked us up from the depot. . . .[to] this little church that was just south of the courthouse—it's torn down now and that apartment house is built there. They took us in there and lined us all up on the platform. . . . we was supposed to have been in Red Cloud a day sooner but our train had a derailment and so we was a day late getting in here. So the people that had come in the day before, most of them couldn't come the next day. . . . They couldn't make the drive again. So we set up there and this boy and I was set together. And there was a man from Cowles. He run the sand pit up there. Rees Thompson was his name . . . and Mr. Thompson, I remember, he sat right up on the front row. And this boy and I happened to be right on the front row, and he hadn't more than got in there and he pointed his finger at me and he said, "I want that boy. He looks like Doc Wells." 

I said, "No," and I wouldn't go. And so then he said, "Well, I'll take the one next to him," but the other boy said, "No," and he wouldn't go. Then they knew there was something up . . . and he said, "I'll take both of you." So he took both of us.

And he took us downtown, and he bought us everything he could think of, and we drove back out to his place. It was about three miles to the Wellses, so the next morning we drove up there and he said to him, "Well, I brought you a boy." The next thing was to get us decided we'd separate, you know. Finally they talked me into it, and he said, "Well, you're only three miles apart. You can see each other just every day or two." So I give in and said I'd stay and the other boy said that would be all right. . . . I think I was there about maybe a week, and a family, name of Sprichers," they had a boy that was the same age as I was and, just about two weeks before we came, why he'd passed away. So they came over talked to the Wellses and tried to talk 'em into the notion of letting me go with them. Mrs. Wells thought it was awful mean not to let them have me when they'd just lost their boy, so they agreed to let me go. I went home with them and stayed all night. The next morning about sun-up, here come a white horse and a buggy, down that hill, and they [the Wellses] come back after me. [Voice breaks.] And I stayed with them from then on. They decided they wouldn't give me up.

[My friend] stayed at the Thompsons and about a week after, something got wrong with him. His head went to one side, and he couldn't hold his head up, so they notified the [orphan's] home, because he'd been in the home for a while, and they sent the [orphanage] man back out here. He come and took him back to New York. He said, "Now we'll take him up there and doctor him up, and he can come back but we'll have to put him in the hospital." They didn't know what was the matter with him. So he took all his playthings and divided them up and give them to me and wanted me to keep them until he come back. On the way back to New York, he went blind. [Voice breaks.] And he was back there about two weeks and then he passed away.

We lived out there for, oh, about a year on the farm. I started to school in the Eckley community, and he [Doc Wells] bought out the hardware store at Cowles. We run the hardware store and implement shop and a furniture shop. I lived there the rest of the time. 

They was awful good to me. I couldn't a had any better if they'd been my own parents. They couldn't a been better. Mrs. Wells lived 'til 1916 and then she passed away. 

I never saw my father again, [because] in 1910 he had came back to New York and was a-working on a real hot day, and he went into a restaurant and set down to eat his dinner, and they brought him a glass of ice water and he drank that glass of ice water. He just fell off the chair and that was it. He died right there. He was only about thirty some years old. I don't know that he ever knew what happened to me. My aunt never did tell him. 

And I never seen or heard anything from my sisters for a long time. And she tried to find out where I was at, and this aunt wouldn't never tell nobody where I went. [When] my dad was still up in Maine . . . she wouldn't tell [and] said I was all right and everything. [Later] my sister finally thought I must have went to an orphanage, and so she  . . . tried to find out from them where I was and they said, "Well, we can't tell you where just exactly he's at," but said "He's in Nebraska." And this sister kept at it and kept at it, and finally they said, "He's in Webster County." Well, as soon as she found out what county I was in, she started writing and got connected with me. I'd write back to her—oh, I wasn't very old, I'd write what little I could. 

So it went along that way for, I guess it was forty years and then finally she made it out here to see me. My sisters came back and forth three or four times. Then in 1948, after I was married, Helen and I went back to New York to see them and then the cemetery where my mother was buried in Green Pine, in New York. And it was quite a ways—we had to go to Brooklyn then go across the river to get to where she was buried. My sisters said they'd been there and they thought they could tell where it was at. Neither one of them could. There had been a stone up there—got broke off—so they just took the stone away.

I said, "I think I know where it is. I remember the day my mother was buried." . . . My sisters thought that was funny, that I was only five years old and could remember that. I was five years old. 

You can read the original text of the interview with George Wells by visiting the archives at the National Willa Cather Center. More information about the orphan train movement can be found by visiting the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas.