Life at the Orphanage

Kansas Charley Goes to School

Aug 15, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion

Kansas Charley and his siblings are admitted to the New York City Orphan Asylum. In time, his brothers and sister are placed with families, leaving Charley all alone.

Charley Muller, later known as Kansas Charley, on April 1, 1881, with his brothers and sister, was admitted to the New York City Orphan Asylum. Their father had committed suicide six days previous. Their mother had died some eighteen months before. No longer would the boy named Karl Muller by his parents be known by that name. He was now Charley Miller. He was six years old.

A Little Bit of the Good Things

At the New York Orphanage the Miller children, now known as Carrie, Fred, Charley, and Willie Miller, had clean clothes, clean beds, clean bodies, and schooling. What they did not have was the love of a mother, or that of a father although it seems they had had very little of the latter.

Charley, as well as his siblings, also received the rudiments of an education, including the study of the Bible. Charley learned to read, a talent that may have vastly contributed to his ultimate downfall.

Good-bye Sister, Good-bye Brother

When Charlie's older sister was at the age of ten, just before Christmas in 1882, she was "placed out" of the asylum as a domestic worker. Charley now had one less sibling near him on a daily basis.

Four years later, in 1886, Fred left the asylum. He went west by train with a group of orphans to be adopted. It was an episode in American History. that became known as the "orphan trains." Fred was bound for St. Louis, Missouri and then Kansas.

Left behind at the asylum in New York was Charley and his younger brother Willie. Then when Willie was twelve the Kansas family that had adopted Fred requested that Willie be sent to them also.

But even before Charlie's sister and brothers began to leave the orphanage he had a major, and at the time incurable, problem. It was a situation that would win him no friends now or in the future.

Life at the Orphanage: Kansas Charley Goes to School

, continues with Kansas Charlie's Disease: An Incurable and Embarrassing Condition.

Previous: Kansas Charley Becomes an Orphan: Death to be Taken Lightly.

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