These houses provided basic room and board at low prices to homeless children who hawked newspapers on the streets of American cities.

[13] Brace believed that poor, Catholic immigrants were genetically inferior, deeming them "stupid, foreign criminal class" and the "scum and refuse of ill-formed civilization".

Misery Row was considered to be a main breeding ground of crime and poverty, and an inevitable "fever nest" where disease spread easily.

Brace was also influenced by the writings of Edward Livingstone, a pioneer in prison reform who believed that the best way to deal with crime and poverty was to prevent it.

Realizing the practical need for workers in the developing Western and Midwestern states, he proposed sending homeless children to those communities in the hopes of finding them work or families.

[17] More commonly, groups of 5-30 children of various ages from infant to teenager would travel with an adult agent as escort along a determined route of towns and communities to be placed in foster home situations.

Railroads and charities would provide discount fares, new clothes, bibles, and other sundries to the children for the journeys, and Brace raised money for the program through his writings and speeches.

[18] To improve the chances of successful placement, since many host families harbored strong prejudice towards ethnic groups,[14] Brace instructed that care should be taken to select healthy, attractive children with Anglo-American features to match the majority populations of the communities they were being sent to.

[17] While current views on adoption and child labor laws see this arrangement negatively as a form of child slavery, at the time, it was considered more beneficial and good for the homeless children to secure a source of food and shelter in the countryside, even when in exchange for forced work, than to leave them living homeless on city streets, and common beliefs of the time viewed the countryside and farming families as more "healthy" and "morally upright" than their city counterparts.

The informality and lack of oversight of this arrangement lead to the programs' greatest criticisms as some children were misplaced from records or left in abusive situations.

[20] The trains and relocation efforts began to decline in the face of rising criticism over the lack of oversight and vetting of the placement homes, and changing views on child labor.

[22] In a bold move (and perhaps inspired by his abolitionist and Darwinian mindset), Brace did away with the centuries-old custom of indenture so that the "placed" children were allowed to leave a home if they were uncomfortable with the placement.

[7] While there was occasional abuse, most people agreed that overall, the children were generally better off than on the streets of big cities without proper food, clothing, and shelter.

On August 21, 1854, he married Letitia Neill in Belfast, Ireland, who proved to be a great support to her husband's social reform efforts.

Letitia's father, Robert Neill, was an avid abolitionist and he opened his home to some of the world's most famous anti-slavery orators, including Frederick Douglass.

Under the son's tenure, the Society's facility was moved from New York City to Dobbs Ferry, which continues today as Children's Village.