We were tasked by Hog Press to design the cover for a book by author Jim Burns (Jacksonville, Florida) titled Heartbreak to Heartland: Children of the Orphan Train, which will be published in September of 2026.
The narrative starts in 1911 when a mother of two children dies during the Triangle Waist Shirt Factory fire in New York. Their father disappeared previously, so the orphans are sent west on a train and are adopted by two families in Burlington, Iowa. The story, while fictionalized, refers to actual events. The fire did happen in New York City and the orphan trains took place between 1854 and 1929.
We decided to contrast the dark urban setting in New York, based on actual black-and-white photographs taken during and after the fire, with a bucolic rural Iowa landscape near Burlington (one of the children was adopted by a farmer). A steam-engine connects the two scenes by pulling passenger cars from left to right at the bottom of the page.
The final cover design is below. The cover to the left was an intermediate design.
