Page 4 • Country Acres - Friday, June 19, 2020
He called her
“Mother”
PHOTO SUBMITTED
This stately home, pictured above in 2017, is still in the Rooney family and is commonly referred to as “the big white house.”
Trains brought Eastern orphans to Padua By SARAH COLBURN Staff Writer
PADUA – It was the late 1800s when 5-year-old James Bradley stepped off the Orphan Train in Padua. He’d come from New York City and was one PHOTO SUBMITTED of roughly 200,000 orphaned and/or This newspaper clipping shows James homeless children transported via train
Bradley Imdieke as a young man.
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from cities in the Eastern United States to those in the Midwest. The movement was part of a supervised welfare program that continued from 1854 to 1929. Bradley, fostered locally by Ben and Mary Imdieke, was one of many children from the Orphan Train who became intertwined with the Rooney family in
the Padua community. Bradley took the Imdieke name as he grew up on the family farm. He was the oldest of 10 kids. One of his siblings was Elizabeth (Imdieke) Rooney. Though the family relationship was formed more than 100 years ago, Elizabeth’s oldest son, Mike, and his wife, Lolly Rooney, still bring a pot of red geraniums to James’ gravesite each year – front row, last one on the left – in the Padua Cemetery. “It’s just kind of tradition,” said Mike. “We go down there quite often, once a week, to water the live plants – two on my folks’ graves and one on James’.” The stories don’t come up a lot, but each year around Memorial Day, there’s talk of the Orphan Train and what it must have been like for the kids who came from a bustling city to rural Minnesota. “Talk about the Wild West,” Mike said. “When that train came in, they’d dump some kids off and you picked one up. Adoption then was a far cry from the way it is today.” James spent his youth on the Imdieke family farm where they raised cattle, pigs and some sheep, in addition to farming roughly 320 acres. He later served in WWI where, among his many duties as a solider, he played the bugle. He returned to his given Bradley name when he entered the military. When he returned from the war, he came home to the farm. By then, his siblings were all grown and handling the chores. He went to the Dakotas in search of work and became a farmhand there. In 1921, Bradley became sick and was admitted to a hospital in the Twin Cities. Mary Imdieke had not realized
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