In the Gilded Age, the word โorphanโ covered far more children than it does today. From the Civil War to the Great Depression, orphan asylums provided more aid to Americaโs dependent children than any other source, yet most of the children inside them were half-orphans, meaning they had one living parent who could not support them.
That parent was often a widowed or deserted mother who could not earn a wage and care for several young children at the same time. Parents often placed children in an asylum during a hard stretch and intended to bring them home once things improved. Some institutions were built around this arrangement.
The Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, founded by wealthy volunteers, started as a day nursery for the children of working mothers. Jewish philanthropists, many of them women, opened orphanages so that immigrant children would not lose their faith in Christian institutions.
Life inside was often strictly regimented, and siblings were frequently split up. Children with no parent to reclaim them might be sent west on the orphan trains instead. By the 1890s, critics were calling the asylums overcrowded and impersonal, and by 1909 reformers were urging aid to poor mothers so that children could stay at home.
Abandoned infants faced worse odds. Before the Civil War, New York sent them to the almshouse, where they were housed alongside the sick, the poor, and the mentally ill.
On October 11, 1869, Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon and two other Sisters of Charity opened the New York Foundling Asylum in a rented brownstone on East Twelfth Street and placed a cradle at the door so that babies could be left anonymously. The first infant arrived that same night, and more than a hundred followed by the end of the year.
The city ran its own Infant Hospital on Randallโs Island in the East River, where survival was grim. In 1890, the reformer Jacob Riis reported that 333 of the 508 babies received at Randallโs Island Hospital the previous year had died. He noted that most foundlings came from the East Side and described many as abandoned by young, unmarried mothers.
He dismissed newspaper stories about richly dressed foundlings as fiction. The babies arrived in rags, sometimes with a note pinned on, such as one he quoted: โTake care of Johnny, for Godโs sake. I cannot.โ
