In October 1849, a young seminary student in New York City rowed across the East River to preach. Charles Loring Brace had been charged to speak to terminally ill young women who resided at a charity hospital on Blackwell’s Island, a two-mile strip of land nestled between Manhattan and Queens.
Now known as Roosevelt Island, it once housed “undesirables” in institutions including a lunatic asylum, two almshouses, a charity hospital with a children’s ward, and a penitentiary. Brace knew many of the women he preached to were dying from venereal diseases contracted after they were driven into prostitution and shunned by society. Weeping as he spoke of Jesus’ love, Brace visited others on the island after his sermon and ministered to them as well.
This visit and others like it deeply affected Brace, inspiring him to dedicate his ministry to helping New York City’s most vulnerable. And nearly 200 years later, systems he created to care for orphans and the poorest of the poor are still in use. Brace founded the still-operating Children’s Aid Society, which was the nation’s first home for runaways, and he helped pioneer the Orphan Train movement and America’s foster care system. A minister, journalist, abolitionist, and author of nine books, he was inspired by his devotion to Christ to pursue a lifelong work to uplift those struggling in a rapidly changing America.
To understand the significance of Brace’s life and legacy, it’s important to have some sense of 1850s America. At the beginning of the decade, the nation’s 23 million people were spread across 30 states, with most people still living on farms. Yet industrialization, rising immigration, and the slavery debate were reshaping the country.
Between 1815 and 1860, over 5 million immigrants arrived. New York City’s population surged from 60,000 in 1800 to over 1 million by 1860, sparking an unprecedented rise in poverty and crime. Overcrowded, unsafe housing and dangerous, unregulated jobs left tens of thousands living and working in inhumane conditions.
Life for poor children was especially harsh. Many were orphaned by illness, work, or the Civil War. Even poor children whose parents were alive often lived apart from them: Parents who became unemployed or otherwise unable to care for their children commonly “parked” them in orphanages or almshouses until they could afford to bring them back home. Child labor was also rampant, with one in eight children under 15 working in 1870, rising to one in five by 1900. Worst off were the 3,000 homeless children begging in New York City’s streets.
In his memoir, The Dangerous Classes of New York, Brace described the conditions faced by many children he encountered:
Parents drink, and abuse their little ones, and they float away on the currents of the street; step-mothers or step-fathers drive out, by neglect and ill-treatment, their sons from home. Thousands are the children of poor foreigners, who have permitted them to grow up without school, education, or religion.
The plight of New York’s poor children was a stark contrast to Brace’s own upbringing. Born in 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut, he was the second of four children in a privileged family that included prominent ministers, abolitionists, judges, and lawyers. His mother was related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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Brace’s father, a teacher at a prominent girls’ school, assigned essays on topics like “the difference between the natural and the moral sublime,” well afield from the era’s typical focus on domestic arts and elocution as suitable knowledge for girls. When Charles was seven, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and attended North Congregational Church, led by theologian and civic leader Horace Bushnell, whose influence left a lasting mark on Brace.
After graduating at the top of his class from Yale Divinity School in 1848, Brace continued his studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. It was there that he committed his life to helping impoverished children. He created programs for “street Arabs”—as they were called at the time—and advocated for laws limiting child labor and keeping children out of almshouses for adults. He also won an award for his efforts to stop the exploitation of children brought from Italy in the infamous padrone system to work as beggars and street performers on the city’s streets.
In 1853, at 27, Brace cofounded the Children’s Aid Society (CAS). It would focus on improving children’s lives through initiatives like a summer home for girls, a sanitarium for sick babies, and CAS’s own probation department upon the founding of the first juvenile court. CAS laid the foundation for the US child welfare system, which was a revolutionary model for child protection in its day.
The next year, Brace opened the first runaway shelter, the Newsboys’ Lodging House, which also educated its residents. He went on to establish additional homes for boys and girls but became increasingly aware that he couldn’t pay enough employees or build enough group homes to care for all the vulnerable and needy children in the city. Instead, he began making plans to send children outside New York to give them a chance to flourish.
Brace’s Emigration Plan, now typically called the Orphan Train movement, began in 1854 and continued for 75 years. An estimated 105,000 children were routed to families outside of New York City in hopes of a better life—one shaped by farm work, small-town communities, family bonds, and Christian values. CAS required families to care for, educate, and treat the children as their own, though the agreement was informal and could be terminated at any time.
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The program was hailed as a success in its era, credited not just with uplifting the circumstances of cast-off kids but even with reducing crime in New York City. Many of the children did thrive—even excelled. Some became state governors, and one was a Supreme Court justice. Today, an estimated 3 million people are descendants of Orphan Train children.
Many people view the Orphan Train more skeptically today, and for some, its shortcomings overshadow its successes. Receiving families weren’t adequately screened, and oversight was often lax. Some children were abused by their new families. Siblings were separated, and some children ended up in worse conditions than ones from which they were “rescued.” In hindsight, it’s clear that Brace placed far too much faith in strangers’ ability to care for the children he relocated.
From our vantage, the entire concept may seem appalling, but in the days of child labor and crowded tenements, this kind of uniform solution to child welfare seemed appropriate. In theory and sometimes in practice, it was a clear advance over the failures of institutional care for orphans Brace had seen in places like Blackwell’s Island. As scholar Stephen O’Connor speculates in his book on the Orphan Trains, Brace’s plan “may have succeeded as well as could reasonably be expected.”
But Brace’s legacy is bigger than any one program. When he began his work in New York, the prevailing attitude was that the poor deserved harsh treatment. Their conditions were typically seen as divine punishment for laziness or other sins. Almshouses and orphanages were strict yet poorly run, and they notoriously underfed their charges.
Inspired by Bushnell’s sermons on spiritual development, Brace argued that we should not judge the poor for their destitution but treat them with kindness, dignity, and respect:
As Christian men, we cannot look upon this great multitude of unhappy, deserted, and degraded boys and girls without feeling our responsibility to God for them. We remember that they have the same capacities, the same need of kind and good influences, and the same immortality as the little ones in our own homes. We bear in mind that One died for them, even as for the children of the rich and happy.
In fact, Brace called Jesus the “greatest reformer of all time” and criticized New York’s materialism and American “anemic” spirituality. As an abolitionist, he castigated the church for allowing slavery. Above all, Brace was a man of action. “Quite simply,” writes Karen M. Staller in her history of CAS, “Brace saw the life of Jesus Christ as a model for his vision of missionary work. He wanted to travel among the poor embodying Christian values and inspiring others through deeds rather than words.”
More than a century after his death, Brace’s influence continues. He changed how Americans, particularly American Christians, think about their duty to care for children in need, both theologically and practically in emphasizing family care over institutionalization. But more than anything, beyond all his policies and programs, Brace wanted the children he served to know Jesus as their Savior.
Don’t think Jesus would only “trouble himself” about the “very rich, or very learned,” he told them. “Your soul is just as much to Him, as the soul of the richest boy on Fifth Avenue. … He knows all the trials you have had, all your lonely times, all your troubles at home, all your hunger and cold and poverty: when your little brothers and sisters were crying for food and you could not get it, He heard it; when your father or your mother became worse in their habits every day and you could not stop it … He saw it all and felt it all.”
Christina Ray Stanton is a New York City–based writer and licensed NYC tour guide since 1995. She has written over 30 articles about 9/11, and her 2019 book about 9/11 won two prestigious awards.
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