Charles Loring Brace

A bridge-builder turned director of boys clubs, Charles Loring Brace devoted thirty-seven years of his life to aiding the tenement children of New York to go straight. It is an extraordinary record that he and his father before him made in their seventy-five uninterrupted years of service. Charles Loring Brace, Sr., founded the Children’s Aid Society and the Newsboys Lodging House in 1853. (The latter now bears the name of the Brace Memorial Newsboys House.) From the start the society has done pioneer work. Anyone who thinks of organized charity as a static institution, devoted largely to maintaining the jobs of its workers, should read the record of the Braces, father and son. Among the first things that the Children’s Aid Society helped to create were the first boys club, the first child placement in a foster home (as distinguished from an “orphan asylum”), the first mothers club, the first truant officer in New York schools, the first bill restricting child labor, the first children’s fresh-air home, the first compulsory education law, the first crèche and nursery for day care of children of working mothers, the first seaside sanitarium for mothers and children, and the first free dental clinic for school children. The younger Brace was completing a railroad bridge in Wisconsin in 1890—he was then thirty-five—when he received word from his father to come East. He found his father gravely overtaxed in his work and seriously ill. The father asked the son to promise to continue his work uninterruptedly. The son gave his promise, and when the father died shortly after, Brace, Jr., took over the secretaryship of the Children’s Aid Society. “I might have spent thirty-five years building bridges. I believe the work I have done in that time will endure longer and benefit more people.” So said Brace in recalling his promise to his father and declaring that he had never regretted it.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials