The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is an excellent time to reflect on and give thanks for one’s blessings. We were doing so with friends when conversation turned to the adoption of neglected children. We implicitly agreed that one important measure of a society is the care it provides for needy children. This reminded me of the orphan trains of our past.

Causes of this situation included massive immigration and searing poverty. Cities were overcrowded and tenements often housed ten or more persons to the room. Jobs were scarce and labor cheap. Child neglect was common. This situation plus the good will of the well off generated the orphan trains.

From 1854 until 1929 some 200,000 neglected, abandoned, or orphaned children were sent west from eastern cities. In the 1850s, there were an estimated 30,000 children homeless in New York City alone. That’s when Charles Brace founded The Children’s Aid Society, an early example of social entrepreneurship. (The New York Founding Hospital had a similar program.)

Brace believed that the life chances of these children could be improved. By removing youngsters from the grim reality and debauchery of city streets and placing them in morally upright farm families, their chances of escaping a lifetime of suffering and failure would be better. This initiated foster care in America.

The children, not all orphans but all severely disadvantaged, were to help with chores around the farm. Older children placed by The Children’s Aid Society were to be paid for their labors. An agent accompanied children in groups of 10 to 40. They traveled on trains to towns where families took them in. Agents would send flyers to towns along the way, and arrange for a screening committee to place the children.

The committee was comprised of responsible individuals, usually a town doctor, clergyman, newspaper editor, merchant, and teacher. The committee approved possible parents for the children. When the children arrived, a contract was signed between the families and the Children’s Aid Society. The contract began:

“Boys under 15 years of age, if not legally, adopted, must be retained as members of the family and sent to school according to the Educational Laws of the State, until they are 18 years old. Suitable provision must then be made for their future.”

The explicit goal was to place hugely disadvantaged children in God-fearing homes where food would be plentiful and air pure. Living on a farm would develop a good work ethic. This would foster mature responsible adults.

While many may recoil from these arrangements, at that time we had no welfare and child protection laws. Poverty was a sentence. Also, without the extended family to supply care in times of need, young families fell apart. Many men were killed in accidents or abandoned their families. This left women and children to, barely, survive on their own.

This sounds increasingly familiar, as there are ever more fatherless, drug afflicted, and dysfunctional families.

We can learn from the orphan train experiments. America would benefit if we found ways to place children in more wholesome and constructive settings. Today’s causes of family dysfunction are different, but the problems of poverty and neglect are parallel. We can’t replicate orphan trains approach to problems of needy children.

We lack the clear web of passenger rail lines linking cities with towns, and children are no longer as useful for farm work. Farmers and farm laborers fell from 33 percent of the labor force in 1910 to 1.2 percent in 2000. Opportunities to place needy children on farms are gone—but the key to entrepreneurship is innovation. Can someone create an analogous arrangement?

America is going through fundamental cultural and economic transformations. These replicate earlier problems of abuse and neglect. And children lacking warm exposure to successful, responsible adults are ill prepared for life’s challenges. Social entrepreneurship focused on adoption and foster care might address these problems and benefit America.