by Al Lacy
OTHER BOOKS BY AL LACY
Angel of Mercy series:
A Promise for Breanna (Book One)
Faithful Heart (Book Two)
Captive Set Free (Book Three)
A Dream Fulfilled (Book Four)
Suffer the Little Children (Book Five)
Whither Thou Goest (Book Six)
Final Justice (Book Seven)
Not by Might (Book Eight)
Things Not Seen (Book Nine)
Far Above Rubies (Book Ten)
Journeys of the Stranger series:
Legacy (Book One)
Silent Abduction (Book Two)
Blizzard (Book Three)
Tears of the Sun (Book Four)
Circle of Fire (Book Five)
Quiet Thunder (Book Six)
Snow Ghost (Book Seven)
Battles of Destiny (Civil War series):
Beloved Enemy (Battle of First Bull Run)
A Heart Divided (Battle of Mobile Bay)
A Promise Unbroken (Battle of Rich Mountain)
Shadowed Memories (Battle of Shiloh)
Joy from Ashes (Battle of Fredericksburg)
Season of Valor (Battle of Gettysburg)
Wings of the Wind (Battle of Antietam)
Turn of Glory (Battle of Chancellorsville)
Hannah of Fort Bridger series (coauthored with JoAnna Lacy):
Under the Distant Sky (Book One)
Consider the Lilies (Book Two)
No Place for Fear (Book Three)
Pillow of Stone (Book Four)
The Perfect Gift (Book Five)
Touch of Compassion (Book Six)
Beyond the Valley (Book Seven)
Damascus Journey (Book Eight)
Mail Order Bride series (coauthored with JoAnna Lacy):
Secrets of the Heart (Book One)
A Time to Love (Book Two)
Tender Flame (Book Three)
Blessed Are the Merciful (Book Four)
Ransom of Love (Book Five)
Until the Daybreak (Book Six)
Sincerely Yours (Book Seven)
A Measure of Grace (Book Eight)
So Little Time (Book Nine)
Let There Be Light (Book Ten)
This book is dedicated to
our dear friend, neighbor, and faithful fan,
Rosella Halsey.
God bless you, Rosella.
We love you.
2 TIMOTHY 4:22
PROLOGUE
In midnineteenth century New York City, which had grown by leaps and bounds with immigrants from all over Europe coming by the thousands into the city, the streets were filled with destitute, vagrant children. For the most part, they were anywhere from two years of age up to fifteen or sixteen.
The city’s politicians termed them “orphans,” though a great number had living parents, or at least one living parent. The city’s newspapers called them orphans, half-orphans, foundlings, street Arabs, waifs, and street urchins.
Many of these children resorted to begging or stealing while a few found jobs selling newspapers; sweeping stores, restaurants, and sidewalks; and peddling apples, oranges, and flowers on the street corners. Others sold matches and toothpicks. Still others shined shoes. A few rummaged through trash cans for rags, boxes, or refuse paper to sell.
In 1852, New York City’s mayor said there were some 30,000 of these orphans on the city’s streets. Most of those thousands who wandered the streets were ill-clad, unwashed, and half starved. Some actually died of starvation or froze to death. The orphans slept in boxes and trash bins in the alleys during the winter, and in warm weather, some slept on park benches or on the grass in Central Park.
Some of the children still had both parents, but were merely turned loose by the parents because the family had grown too large and they could not care for all their children. Many of the street waifs were runaways from parental abuse, parental immorality, and parental drunkenness.
In 1848, a young man named Charles Loring Brace, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, and graduate of Yale University, came to New York to study for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary. He was also an author and spent a great deal of time working on his books, which slowed his work at the seminary. He still had not graduated by the spring of 1852 but something else was beginning to occupy his mind. He was horrified both by the hordes of vagrant children he saw on the streets daily, and by the way the civil authorities treated them. The city’s solution for years had been to sweep the wayfaring children into jails or run-down almshouses.
Brace believed the children should not be punished for their predicament, but should be given a positive environment in which to live and grow up. In January 1853, after finishing the manuscript for a new book and submitting it to his New York publisher, Brace dropped out of seminary and met with a group of pastors, bankers, businessmen, and lawyers—all who professed to be born-again Christians—and began the groundwork to establish an organization that would do something in a positive way to help New York City’s poor, homeless children.
Because Brace was clearly a brilliant and dedicated young man—all of twenty-seven—and because he was a rapidly rising literary figure on the New York scene, these men backed him in his desire, and by March 1853, the Children’s Aid Society was established. Brace was its leader, and the men helped raise funds from many kinds of businesses and people of wealth who believed in what they were doing.
Sufficient funds were coming in from contributors, allowing Brace to take over the former Italian Opera House at the corner of Astor Place and Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan.
From the beginning, Brace and his colleagues attempted to find homes for individual children, but it was soon evident that the growing number of street waifs would have to be placed elsewhere. Brace came upon the idea of taking groups of these orphans in wagons to the rural areas in upstate New York and allowing farmers to simply pick out the ones they wanted for themselves and become their foster parents.
This plan indeed provided some homes for the street waifs, but not enough to meet the demand. By June 1854, Brace came to the conclusion that the children would have to be taken westward where there were larger rural areas. One of his colleagues in the Children’s Aid Society had friends in Dowagiac, Michigan, who had learned of the Society’s work and wrote to tell him they thought people of their area would be interested in taking some of the children into their homes under the foster plan.
Hence came the first “orphan train.” In mid-September 1854, under Charles Brace’s instructions, Dowagiac’s local newspaper carried an ad every day for two weeks, announcing that forty-five homeless boys and girls from the streets of New York City would arrive by train on October 1 and on the morning of October 2 could be seen at the town’s meetinghouse. Bills were posted at the general store, cafés, restaurants, and the railroad station, asking families to provide foster homes for these orphans.
One of Brace’s paid associates, E. P. Smith, was assigned to take the children on the train to Dowagiac, which is located in southwestern Michigan. Smith’s wife accompanied him to chaperone the girls.
The meetinghouse was fairly packed as the children stood behind Smith on the platform while he spoke to the crowd. He explained the program, saying these unfortunate children were Christ’s little ones who needed a chance in life. He told the crowd that kind men and women who opened their homes to one or more of this ragged regiment would be expected to raise them as they would their own children, providing them with decent food and clothing, and a good education.
There would be no loss in their charity, Smith assured his audience. The boys would do whatever farm work or other work that was expected of them, and the girls would do all types of housework.
; As the children stood in line to be inspected, the applicants moved past them slowly, looking them over and engaging them in conversation. At the same time, E. P. Smith and his wife looked at the quality and cleanliness of the prospective foster parents and asked them about their financial condition, property, vocation, and church attendance. If they were satisfied with what they heard, and saw no evidence that the prospective parents were lying, they let them choose the child or children they desired.
When the applicants had chosen the children they wanted, thirty-seven had homes. The remaining eight were taken back to New York and placed in already overcrowded orphanages. Charles Brace was so encouraged by the high percentage of the children who had been taken into the homes, that he soon launched into a campaign to take children both from off the streets and from the orphanages, put them on trains, and take them west where there were farms and ranches aplenty.
When the railroad companies saw what Brace’s Children’s Aid Society was doing, they contacted him and offered generous discounts on tickets, and each railroad company offered special coaches, which would carry only the orphans and their chaperones.
For the next seventy-five years—until the last orphan train carried the waifs to Texas in 1929—the Children’s Aid Society placed some 250,000 children in homes in every western state and territory except Arizona. Upon Brace’s death in 1890, his son, Charles Loring Brace Jr., took over the Society.
In 1910, a survey concluded that 87 percent of the children shipped to the West had grown into credible members of western society. Eight percent had been returned to New York City, and 5 percent had either disappeared, were imprisoned for crimes, or had died.
It is to the credit of Charles Loring Brace’s dream, labor, and leadership in the orphan train system that two of the orphans grew up to become state governors, several became mayors, one became a Supreme Court justice, two became congressmen, thirty-five became lawyers, and nineteen became physicians. Others became successful gospel preachers, lawmen, farmers, ranchers, businessmen, wives, and mothers—those who made up a great part of society in the West.
Until well into the twentieth century, Brace’s influence was felt by virtually every program established to help homeless and needy children. Even today, the philosophical foundations he forged have left him—in the minds of many—the preeminent figure in American child welfare history.
Chapter One
Lightning spread its thin white branches across the cloudy sky and sent its jagged roots down toward New York City on an evening in mid-April 1871. Crashes of thunder rocked the air like giant cannons venting their wrath on some unseen enemy.
A shrill wind pelted the pedestrians who were hurrying along the streets, threatening to upend the sea of umbrellas in the hands of the teeming crowds as they made their separate ways toward home and shelter.
Inside Chadwick’s Bookstore in downtown Manhattan, the patrons were aware of the slanting rain drumming on the windows, the flashes of light in the dark sky, and the rumble of the thunder.
Ceiling lanterns cast a soft glow over the crowded bookshelves, and a small fire burned in the black potbellied stove at the center of the store. A coziness was laying over the few customers who were doing some last minute browsing, hoping the downpour would stop before closing time came and they were forced back onto the street.
Craig and Fay Weston watched their two youngest children, twelve-year-old Diane and nine-year-old Ronnie, draw up to the shelves in the children’s section and begin looking at books. Craig and Fay moved on toward the historical section. As they drew near, Craig smiled and looked at Fay. “There it is.”
He reached up and took a thick book from the top shelf with the bold title printed on the spine: The History of Medicine. Fay watched as he thumbed his way through it and looked at the last page. “Just as the ad in the newspaper said, honey—seven hundred and forty-three pages.”
Then he flipped back to the front of the book and looked at the first page. “Mm-hmm. Just as the paper said, the contributing authors went back and began in 200 B.C. and have brought it up to today.”
At that point, Fay noted the price where it was penciled on the inside of the cover. She looked up at her husband, a small frown marring her pretty face. “Twelve dollars, honey,” she said in an undertone. “The newspaper didn’t tell us the price. I—I’ve only got seven dollars saved up. Can we afford twelve dollars?”
Craig smiled. “Yes, sweetheart. I’ve been saving up, too. Let’s use my nine dollars, and three of yours. This is going to be the best birthday surprise Dane has ever had. He’s going to love it.”
“He sure will!” said Fay, her eyes sparkling as she reached into her coat pocket, drew out a worn envelope, and handed it to him. “We want to do all we can to encourage and support him. Let’s go buy it.”
Craig opened the envelope and extracted three one-dollar bills.
“We can use all of my savings, honey,” she said softly.
Craig shook his head and handed the envelope back. “That’s all right. You keep the rest of it.” A wide grin split his face and he added, “You have really been cutting some corners from your household and grocery money, love, to save this much!”
She giggled. “Well, you’d be surprised at what can be done when a woman sets her heart and mind to it!”
Craig reached into his pocket and brought out his own tattered envelope. He took out the nine one-dollar bills and placed her three with them.
Fay’s dark eyes shone with happy tears. “Oh, Dane’s going to be so thrilled with this book! He will probably have his head buried in it for weeks and months to come. What a very special birthday he is going to have!”
Craig smiled. “That’s for sure!”
Fay gave him an impish look.
He looked at her skeptically. “Yes, honey?”
“You know what I’d like to do with some of this money I have left?”
“What?”
“Well, we don’t get to eat out very often. And since Dane’s eating with the Baxters this evening, how about we walk the half-block down to the Twenty-Third Street Café and have supper when we leave here?”
“Well, why not?” He shook his head and frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing. I just have to marvel at how you were able to save such an amount of money on the small bit I can give you each week.”
Fay smiled and wrinkled her nose. “Oh, you know the old saying: ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’”
Craig tweaked her nose, grinning. “Well, my love, let’s go pay for this book and head for the café.”
She took hold of his arm, and as they headed for the front of the store, Fay called to Diane and Ronnie, who were still at the children’s book section. “Come on, children. We found the book. Let’s go.”
Diane and Ronnie hurried and caught up with their parents, both happy to hear that their parents had found the book they wanted to give their big brother for his birthday.
When they drew up to the counter, Frank Chadwick was just finishing with his last customer, except for the Westons. When the man walked away, clutching a paper bag, Chadwick smiled. “Hello, Weston family. Where’s Dane?”
“He’s spending the evening with one of his friends in the neighborhood,” Craig advised him. “We worked this out so we could come in here and buy this book for him. His birthday is next Tuesday, April 25.”
Chadwick eyed the thick book as Craig laid it on the counter. “Ah, yes. The History of Medicine. He will love it. I’ve sold you several books on medicine for him, but this is the best yet. It will give him insight on medicine all the way back to 200 B.C.”
Craig nodded. “When we saw the advertisement on this book in the New York Times a few weeks ago, and that it covered such a tremendous span of time, Fay and I agreed that no matter what it cost, we would find a way to buy it for Dane and give it to him for his birthday.”
Chadwick smiled. “You two should be very proud of that bo
y.”
“We are indeed very proud of him, Mr. Chadwick.”
“Yes,” put in Fay. “Ever since Dane had scarlet fever when he was ten and had to be hospitalized with it, he has been fascinated with medicine, doctors, nurses, and hospitals. From that time on, he has had one ambition: to become a medical doctor and a surgeon.”
“We have no idea how we’re going to pay for his medical education,” said Craig, “but since he’s just turning fifteen, we still have time to figure it out. We’ll work something out, I can tell you that for sure.”
“I have no doubt of that,” said Chadwick as he placed the book into a paper bag.
Craig paid him, and as he picked up the paper bag, Chadwick said, “I’d like to know how Dane likes the book.”
Fay smiled. “We’ll have Dane come in and tell you himself.”
“Good!”
Chadwick followed the Westons to the door, and since it was closing time, when they moved outside, he locked the door behind them and put the closed sign in the window.
The cold rain was still coming down as the happy foursome made their way down the street, with both Craig and Fay carrying umbrellas. Ronnie was walking close to his mother, and Diane was under her father’s umbrella.
“I’m so excited!” said Diane. “Dane is going to love that book!”
“Yeah!” said Ronnie. “I can’t wait to see his face at his birthday party when he opens that present!”
Suddenly it dawned on Diane that they were going the opposite direction than they would in order to go home. “Papa, how come we’re going this way?”
Ronnie’s eyes widened. “Oh. Yeah! How come?”
“We’re going to eat supper down here at the café!” said Fay.
Both children let out a squeal, and soon they had covered the half-block, and turned into the Twenty-Third Street Café, their spirits high.
Warm air and delicious aromas greeted them, and immediately everybody in the family was hungry. They chose a table in the corner next to the large rain-streaked window that overlooked the street. A waitress approached them and took their orders.
While they were waiting for their food, they talked about Dane’s upcoming birthday party. Fay told the others that she had been able to secretly contact Dane’s five closest friends from school: Todd Baxter, Henry Wilson, Willie Thornton, Becky Simpson, and Matilda Andrews. They all planned to be at the party.