It was March 15, 1906. The train pulling into the eastern Iowa town of Hopkinton that morning would have attracted an unusual amount of attention. Townspeople would have stopped what they were doing to watch. Shop owners would have stood in their doorways as the locomotive slowed near the depot. 

A notice placed in the Hopkinton newspaper days earlier had described the upcoming arrival of a company of orphan children. It said, "the object of the coming of these children is to find homes in your midst, especially among farmers where they may enjoy a happy and wholesome family life, where kind care, good example and moral training will fit them for a life of self-support and usefulness." 

Inside the train that day, eight children would have peered out the windows wondering about this place so far from New York. The group soon made its way off the train and down the block to the Hotel Hopkinton. After changing into the finer clothes they had been given, they were escorted to the nearby Masonic Lodge where a group had gathered to see the children being offered. The boys and girls were asked to stand and sing a song, recite poetry, anything that might endear them to the crowd. 

By the time the gathering had ended, each of the eight children had gone home with a different set of strangers. Between 1854 and 1929, this scene played out many times across the United States, particularly in the Midwest. These trips, which essentially amounted to the resettlement of a quarter of a million children, were later collectively described as the Orphan Train Movement.