"A little mentioned piece of our history is that from 1854 to 1930 orphan homes shipped children who had no relative willing and able to care for them to rural areas to work on farms as indentured servants."
Sister of St. Joseph Judith E. Kappenman is author of the recently self-published book, “To Dakota and Back: The Story of an Orphan Train Rider,” which chronicles the experience of her maternal grandfather, John Donahue.
She will read from her book on Oct. 24 at 2 p.m. in Alumnae Library at Elms College in Chicopee. Copies of the 259-page book will also be for sale for $20. They are also available at www.Lulu.com, by calling the author at (413) 592-7165 or emailing her at email@example.com
The Republican’s 2011 Kids in Print art and writing contests will carry the theme of immigration. Kappenman, who is director of the Irish Cultural Center at Elms, was ask about the inspiration for her book and what she learned.
What is your heritage and what inspired you to write the book?
My maternal grandparents (John and T. Elizabeth Craig Donahue) were both children of Irish immigrants; my paternal grandfather (Frank Kappenman), son of German immigrants, married Rosella Nugent who claimed Irish ancestry.
From childhood I said I was three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German, even though the Kappenman name I carried was the first thing people learned about me.
As a child I listened to my grandfather John Donahue tell stories of growing up on a farm with a family not his own. We loved our Donahue grandparents because they were loving, kind and supportive, encouraging us in everything we did.
They were proud of their children and grandchildren. (Since we moved away from South Dakota when I was a child we had lost day-to- day contact with our Kappenman grandparents.)
After both her parents died in the 1960s, and as she weakened with age, my mother, Kathleen Donahue Kappenman, repeated often and with increasing intensity, “Someone has to write Granddad’s story.”
I promised her that I would do so, but only when I retired from teaching. She died trusting that I would. I have kept the promise.
Who is the central character in the book and how is he related to you?
The book tells the story of John Donahue, my maternal grandfather, a man who was a central and much loved figure in my childhood.
He was one of hundreds of thousands of children taken from a city orphan home in the East and sent to work on farms throughout the country for more than 70 years.
What were the orphan trains and how did your relative end up on one? How old were they at the time? What did you think about in terms of them being so young and being sent so far a way from family?
A little mentioned piece of our history is that from 1854 to 1930 orphan homes shipped children who had no relative willing and able to care for them to rural areas to work on farms as indentured servants.
It was a kind of child welfare system called family placement or out placement.
The term “orphan train riders” was used only after the practice had been discontinued. Girls were often sent to hotels or private homes for domestic work.
My grandfather Donahue and his older brother, at about the age of eight and nine, were sent on a train from the Home for Catholic Destitute Children in Boston to South Dakota to work on separate farms 20 miles apart.
Their father had placed his three children in the home after his wife died when my grandfather was four years old.
The two boys never saw their younger sister or their father after they were sent away from Boston.
What did you uncover about their experience as young people having to adjust to a whole different environment and family?
These placed-out children had already lost family and all that was familiar. They lived for several years in an institution with children similarly dislocated.
I can only imagine a second move from the city to a rural area where they lived with strangers and saw other people rarely.
To travel from the routine of orphan home life to the foreign world of farm labor must have called forth inner survival resources.
In John’s case he found himself in the home of two immigrants — the father from Ireland, the mother from Germany. Perhaps an even more painful fact was that this woman knew little English when he arrived. Also because they had their own children, John was made to feel even more isolated and alone.
Some children known as orphan train riders were abused; others were loved and even adopted.
Stephen O’Connor chronicles the story of the practice in his definitive book, “Orphan Train Riders the Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed.”
As they got older, what were they able to achieve? What happened in their lives?
In adulthood my grandfather married the daughter of Irish immigrants and, with his wife formed a unique and wonderful partnership, fostering love and ways of good living in his two children, Terence and Kathleen (my mother), and 10 grandchildren.
He became a businessman, first in the land business, later in insurance and as manager of the town grain elevator. Even though he had a limited education, he was self taught and succeeded in anything he tried. He did his best work as owner and editor of the weekly newspaper in Ethan, S.D. At the same time, he served as postmaster of the town.
Later, he worked as a supervisor for the Works Progress Administration, and when he moved to Massachusetts, he worked as a supervisor in a factory. At home, his hands were always busy with projects in carpentry, home repair, decorating and gardening.
His brother Tom also married, but sorrow and difficulty stalked the couple. In the first eight years of married life, their first four children died in infancy and early childhood. Later they had three children who lived to adulthood.
Tom worked as a well digger for years and traveled throughout the region. His wife’s twin sister lived with them most of their married life. The twins were hearing impaired and, though they found it difficult to communicate with others, they understood one another.
As a child Tom worked on a farm with a couple who were Irish immigrants. His “foster father” had been orphaned at age 3 in Ireland and raised by relatives. I believe they were more sympathetic to Tom’s plight.
How did you go about your research? What did you learn about the experience of immigrants and their descendants trying to make in living in this country?
I began my research by examining family photos, newspaper clippings, letters and documents left behind in a trunk that my mother had kept. From this I created a chronology of events in John Donahue’s life.
Later I added to this list as I conducted more extensive research. I examined records at the Diocesan Archives in Boston, Boston Public Library, the National Archives, Pittsfield, South Dakota Archives in Pierre and county records in Mitchell, South Dakota.
I read books and articles on the practice of “orphan train riders”; I read about indentured servitude, immigration, homesteading, pioneer life and work on the Plains states. Since my grandfather owned and published a newspaper, I obtained copies through interlibrary loan.
By reading these I learned additional facts about him and small town life in the early 1900s.
In South Boston I visited the street on which he was born and the church where he was baptized. I traveled to South Dakota to walk the streets of the small town where he lived so many years as an adult and visited the farm where he worked as a child.
I learned that many immigrants, especially the Irish, lived in rural areas in their home countries. Surprisingly, many settled in the big cites of this country — Boston, New York, Philadelphia. Here they found crowded conditions, lack of sanitary facilities and difficulty in finding work. Many became ill under the poor living conditions, and like my great grandmother died young.
They took the most menial jobs, and from their meager wages, sent some of that to their family still living in the “home” country. Eventually, they or their children succeeded and many entered service professions of politics, police, fire or the church.
What was going on in the country at the time compared to today?
From the beginning of this country and through the early 1800s, immigrants came in small numbers. But a flood of immigrants arrived from mid-century on.
Most especially, the Irish arrived in great numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, during and immediately following the Great Hunger. Later in the century, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Italians and Jews came to settle in this “land of opportunity.”
Immigrants in the 1800s found an immigration policy that was welcoming to newcomers who provided much needed labor. Often, however, they faced prejudice and discrimination from their neighbors.
Some came for economic reasons when small land holdings couldn’t sustain them; others were displaced because of drought, famine, religious persecution or political oppression.
Several factors opened up this county to immigration, not the least of which was the building of canals and the railroad across the country. Many of these jobs were taken by the Irish in the early days of our country’s development and immigration.
The Industrial Revolution had its part in the expansion, offering more opportunities for workers. Those who settled in the cities often worked in the factories built alongside the canals.
Some newcomers were attracted to the opportunities that the Homestead Act offered in terms of free land. After the Civil War the great movement west began in earnest. My ancestors followed that path finally settling in South Dakota.
The Craig family of my grandmother Donahue and the Coyne family who took in my grandfather both arrived in the same general area of South Dakota in the 1880s to work the land.
The Kappenman family arrived in this country in the 1850s and settled in Dolton, S.D., 50 miles east of Ethan in the 1880s, also taking advantage of the Homestead Act.
Ellis Island opened in 1892 and millions passed through this clearing station until it closed in 1954. In 1921 the Quota Act and in 1924 the National Origins Act was passed — both of which imposed limits on the number and nationality of immigrants.
Immigration continues to be an important resource for American economy and life. A higher percentage of immigrants in the last part of the 1900s and this century include Latin Americans, Mexicans, Africans, and people from the Far East and the Middle East. The debate of immigration policies in this country now focuses on illegal aliens.