Among the thousands of homeless children deposited at the Children’s Aid Society in 1875 by orphan asylums, courts, and other institutions was a four-year-old named Willie, sent by the New York Prison Association. “Almost beyond hope” was the verdict of the society’s agent into whose care the “irrepressible young Irishman” was placed.

Soon the object of this despairing character sketch found himself among a group of forty orphaned and destitute boys and girls travelling by train nearly halfway across the continent, to end up at a little midwestern farm town. There Willie and the other children were taken to the local grange hall, where a group of farmers and their wives waited to look them over and to make some momentous choices.

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