Antebellum Orphan Care

[OldReliable1862]

As I've been doing research for the book I am currently considering writing, I've come across another gap in my knowledge. I'd like to include a pair of brothers in my story whose parents die during the cholera epidemic of 1849-50. I assume that the normal course of action would be to send the children to live with relatives, but what was done in cases where there were no close relatives available?

The Chicago Orphan Asylum was established in 1849 in response to the cholera epidemic, but I don't know what was done in more rural areas.

 

[Reconstructed Rebel]

Well, there was the Orphan Train. Some children found loving step-parents and some found their role in their new families to be more like an unpaid servant or farmworker. As with any other endeavor on a large scale, results were mixed.

History – National Orphan Train Complex

 

[SWS]

My great-great-grandfather's (avatar) father died in the 1849 epidemic, in Peru, Illinois, only a year or two after arriving in the West from Pennsylvania. Fortunately, he had been able to build the family a house before that time, and his widow ended up surviving him by 50 years. She became known as "Grandma" to many townsfolk, and they even inscribed such a sobriquet on her headstone.

My 3rd great-grandmother was not an orphan per se, but she was abandoned as an infant in 1855, and left at my 5th great-grandmother's nephew's (who appears to have been childless in spite of marrying thrice) farm in Crawford Co., Indiana. I believe the story is that she wore a locket containing her name and birthdate. She was also said to be practically blind. She indeed wore very thick glasses. For some reason the 1860 census inflates her age by ten years and lists her as a "farm hand". Her adoptive father and future father-in-law (they themselves already being related thru marriage) served in the same company during the War.

 

[Lampasas Bill]

In some counties orphans with no known relatives were "farmed out" to willing people who agreed to care for them. Their availability would be advertised in a local newspaper, and on certain days they could be interviewed at a court house or other central location until they were selected. Sometimes this worked out well, and they became part of a family, but too often they only served as cheap labor until they became legal adults and could set out on their own. To make it more trying, orphaned siblings were often sent to diffenent homes.

 

[RedRover]

Sometimes they were placed as apprentices where they would be had.

From Kentucky's statutes...

 

[RedRover]

Orphans in the antebellum period included potentially every child without a father, even if their mother yet lived. Andrew Johnson's father died when he was a boy of three, and in time the courts in North Carolina apprenticed him and his older brother to a tailor, when he was ten. He did not complete his time, but after some years ran away, and set up his own tailor shop in Greenville, Tennessee...