The Child City

The Loyal Order of Moose bought a dairy farm in Kane County and built a town on it for the children of members who had died or been disabled. On 14 December 1912 the order's leaders agreed to buy Brookline Farm, seven hundred and fifty acres of Batavia Township, with adjoining land that brought the purchase to one thousand and twenty three acres. Possession came that March, and the place opened on 27 July 1913 with Thomas R. Marshall, then Vice President of the United States, there to dedicate it. A circus tent hired from Ringling Brothers shaded the crowd for the afternoon. The first eleven children had been admitted earlier that month and were already living in the farm's own farmhouse and in rough frame buildings run up that spring. The founding argument was that the death or disability of a member should not sentence that member's children to poverty or to institutional neglect, and the answer settled on was a place rather than a payment. So the ground was laid out as a town, with its own school, its own farm and its own post office. The first two purpose-built residences, both finished in 1914, were dormitories, Loyalty Hall for the boys and Purity Hall for the girls. The cottage system came later, and those houses carry the names of the state and provincial Moose associations that paid for them. Mooseheart runs to about a thousand acres now, with children in some thirty houses grouped by age, and in 1994 the order voted to take applications from any family in need whether or not a Moose member was anywhere in it. It is unincorporated, and has its own post office and ZIP code: on the Illinois state highway map the name sits among the places that are not villages.