"Riders on the Orphan Train"

Novelist and Humanities Scholar Alison Moore and singer/songwriter Phil Lancaster have combined audio visual elements, historical fiction and musical ballads into a collaborative performance that brings the Orphan Train movement, a largely-unknown chapter in American history, to public awareness. The one-and-a-half-hour multi-media presentation, Riders on the Orphan Train, tells the story of the 250,000 orphans and unwanted children who were put on trains in New York between 1854 and 1929 and sent all over the United States to be given away. The presentation is comprised of original music, an audio-visual presentation of archival photographs and interviews with two surviving orphan train riders (a man who came to Berryville, AR and a woman who came to Greenville, TX) and is followed by a dramatic recitation from the new novel "Riders on the Orphan Train" by Alison Moore. This program was made possible in part with a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This program is also supported by Charter PTO.