Ramsey County History – Spring 2004: “A Quilt and a Diary: The Story of the Little Girl Who Rode the Orphan Train to a New Home”

A Quilt and a Diary: The Story of the Little Girl Who Rode the Orphan Train to a New Home
Author: Ann Zemke

The author made a quilt that is used to tell the story of her grandmother, Margaret Peterson, who was an orphan. From 1854 to 1929, thousands of children like her were “placed out” and sent off by rail to find new families. At the time the article was written, there were still 200 orphan train riders alive in Minnesota. Zemke’s grandmother kept a diary and wrote an autobiography that stated that she had been at a home school for a time before heading to northern Minnesota. Most of the children who were resettled came from the Eastern states. When Margaret Peterson was nineteen, she left her new family to go out on her own and married two years later.
PDF of Zemke article