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Boys City Drive is a short stretch of road in Winona Lake, Indiana. It terminates abruptly at the entrance to what was for decades known as Chicago Boy’s Club. This street name and an old sign with the word “Chicago” may appear as misnomers. In fact, they preserve a critical moment in both local and American history. Here is that story.

Judge Willis Brown, touted as the first judge of the first juvenile court in Salt Lake City, Utah, stood confidently before an audience of thirty men, all fairly advanced in age when compared to him. Yet the enthusiasm, knowledge, experience and wisdom of this clean-shaven twenty-four-year-old prodigy shattered any preconceived notions that youthfulness might otherwise have elicited. Besides, his reputation preceded him.

Before his judicial appointment in Utah, Willis Brown had served as a national leader in the war against cigarettes. He campaigned vigorously throughout the United States on behalf of the Anti-Cigarette League whose hard work had resulted in legislation outlawing “coffin nails” in Indiana. Cigarettes, league members argued, threatened to lead young people, especially boys, into other vices.

Judge Brown’s dedication to this national cause and his focus on recovering misguided youth led a Salt Lake City commission to install him as judge of its first juvenile court. Who was better fit for the task than Willis Brown?

That same question had the identical answer in the fall of 1906 at a meeting organized by Sol Dickey, Secretary of the Winona Assembly which was considering the establishment of a camp dedicated to the betterment of boys. At Dickey’s invitation, Judge Brown addressed the assembled benefactors.

“At the turn of the twentieth century, America faces a problem, one greater than the building of the Panama Canal or the sale of alcohol. One that is even more important than world peace! What is this crisis? Why, it’s the boy problem!”

The attentive men in expensive suits nodded as they glanced about in agreement with the speaker’s astute observation. All America fretted over what had come to be called the boy problem.

 “The training which made a strong man a few years ago will not do for today. A boy is surrounded by temptations. He is lured by alcohol, indecent photographs, tobacco, and pool halls. Boys determine the destiny of this country because they are the foundation stones of our great republic.”

The judge paused before emphatically declaring, “We must fit the boy for useful citizenship!”

Brown’s vision enchanted his audience, for Boy City was to be a city run by boys. What genius!

The judge laid out with precision his plan for electing a mayor and a city council. Politically minded boys, he said, would run a campaign. Their peers would vote. Laws would be drawn up and enforced.

He described competitions among athletic teams, a band to entertain the Assembly’s summer guests, and a choir of at least three hundred voices.

“Every boy with a camera will bring his, and we will have a photography club with contests and awards.”

The captivating crusader proposed real commerce in the form of a functioning bank. He pledged a grocery store, restaurant, an ice cream shop and a daily newspaper. Boy City, the judge added, would be a tent city with eight wards. Each tent would have an address to which mail would be delivered by the city’s duly appointed postmaster.

“We will have utilities in the form of a telephone company and limited electricity.”

Judge Brown excited his listeners further by projecting a startling attendance of five thousand boys. The young denizens would have total charge of their city while the judge, his staff, and chaperones supervised them in drafting, implementing, and upholding its laws.

“A boy must be trusted or he will rebel,” the judge warned with all of the authority of a man who knows. “Winona Assembly need only provide the setting and the initial financing. All other responsibilities will fall to me.”  

Brown’s magnetic delivery won over his enthusiastic audience. Sol Dickey and the Winona Assembly wasted little time in publicly announcing its partnership with Judge Willis Brown, promising a novel and effective approach to making boys into good citizens. Such a promise went a long way to comforting the many who despaired of the seeming inevitability of a boy’s corruption in the modern world. Mr. Studebaker, the automobile manufacturer from South Bend, proudly accepted to be Chairman of the venture.

That spring, a dozen workers set about clearing the southern end of the Assembly grounds. They removed thick underbrush and marked off an acre for each ward. They installed street signs and erected a huge tent at the entrance to the camp. They graded and rolled an athletic field and brought in sand for a beach. They installed piers for fifty rowboats. They built a mammoth toboggan chute down which wooden sleds crashed into the lake. Mr. J. G McGee delivered an authentic Columbia Voting Machine that his company manufactured. The new-fangled machine had survived the “voting machine war” a few years before and was recognized as an infallible invention.  

By the end of June, the only thing missing was boys.

On July 26, 1907, a sunburned and dusty contingent arrived on bicycles from Marysville, Ohio, after a one hundred and eighty mile adventure. The Huntington delegation hiked fifty miles to Boy City. A company of twenty-five made their way on foot from Wabash. Hundreds more arrived by train. Uniformed regiments of the Indiana Boys Brigade marched onto the Assembly grounds with Springfield rifles. Under the command of Capt. Biddle, they set up pickets to keep gawkers out. By order of Judge Brown, Boy City fell under military rule until after elections in which the boys overwhelmingly chose fifteen-year-old Frank Abbott of Goshen as the first mayor of Boy City. A watermelon feast followed the ceremonial induction of Abbott and the newly elected city council members.

Before the historic first encampment at Boy City pulled up stakes, the Muncie Evening Register reported its astounding success. Judge Brown had delivered on his promises, and the Winona Assembly wanted to make Boy City a permanent Chautauqua event.

“In a few years,” Judge Willis boasted, “every state will have its own Boy City.” In fact, Judge Brown let slip a plan for a European tour with a group of fifty boys slated for the following year. This news sent a thrill of excitement through the ranks.

More glowing reports poured out of Boy City the second year, giving account of yet another spectacular season. However, in May 1909, two months before the third annual encampment, Sol Dickey issued a surprise press release to the effect that the Winona Assembly had severed all ties with Judge Willis Brown.

When Brown pitched his elaborate—and expensive—vision for Boy City in 1906, his audience did not know that Utah’s State Supreme Court was about to hand down a ruling regarding Brown’s supposed first juvenile court of Utah. Details about his credentials and his antics began circulating in 1907 when former associates set out to expose him as a fraud.

Initially, Sol Dickey defended his young colleague by explaining in a newspaper article that Judge Brown had purposefully legislated himself out of the court, which was Brown’s explanation of the matter. Over time, however, as complaints trickled in, doubts about Brown’s character plagued Dickey. It was the following letter from Judge Benjamin Lindsey that warranted decisive action.

Mr. Dickey,

I am writing concerning an impostor in your midst in the person of Judge Willis Brown. I have no desire to injure the man. I confess I was taken in by him myself several years ago. The truth of the complicated matter is that the man is not a lawyer, and the court he presided over in Salt Lake had no legal standing. I’ve learned that he has bragged of the thousands of dollars he has made on the lecture circuit calling himself a judge and that he jokes of the ease with which he foists himself upon the public. I am not aware of any unscrupulous conduct at Winona Lake. However, you should be warned that he is not an honest man. 

For all of his talk of drawing thousands of boys to Winona, Judge Brown’s Boy City drew only seven hundred the first year and five hundred the second year. Press releases celebrated the camp’s successes, but the balance sheet told a different story. The investment was not paying for itself as Brown had promised. Besides the disappointing budget shortfall, Brown’s methods of overseeing the boys had sparked a number of embarrassing episodes.

The first summer, when two members of the Indiana Boys Brigade were on night patrol, one of the boys accidentally shot the other in the face at close range. The rifle fired a blank that left the other boy with serious but non-life threatening wounds. Mr. Dickey had been called out of bed and had rushed to the scene. The injured boy rode the train home where doctors intervened to save his eyesight. Papers carried the story, and the Assembly responded by actively assuring parents that Boy City was safe for their sons.

On another day, members of the Boys Brigade pursued the milkman through the Assembly grounds all the way to the Winona Hotel, firing volleys (more blanks, thank goodness) before taking the poor fellow into custody. The disturbance brought the sheriff to the camp with the warning that if another gun were fired, everyone would be arrested. The following morning, the boys found themselves without fresh milk and ice, and the Winona Assembly found itself the subject of another embarrassing news story.

Similar problems mounted the second season when over one hundred boys failed to show up—yet another financial loss. And then there was the bizarre circus with a host of strange sights including a sideshow featuring a five hundred-pound “woman” played by a two hundred-pound boy in a dress with a plunging neckline, red lipstick and a blonde wig made from straw. The Assembly’s leaders found the acclaimed circus a considerable deviation from the original vision of a well-run municipality.

Mr. Dickey got up from his desk and walked to the window. The steamer City of Warsaw chugged across the lake. Exhilarated passengers waved to the crowds on the beach. Rowboats bobbed in the steamer’s wake. He thought of the hundreds of patrons filling the auditorium for the afternoon concert and imagined the Shakespeare cast rehearsing for its next performance. He recalled the glamorous floats from Venetian Night the week before when magnificent creations coasted along the canal leaving spectators awestruck.

A barely perceptible smile reflected on the windowpane. Dickey held in his hand the evidence he needed to rid Winona of this huckster once and for all. He tucked the letter into his breast pocket, grabbed his hat and walked in the direction of Willis Brown’s summer cottage.

Boy City operated on an ever-diminishing scale for the next several years. Enthusiastic headlines announcing teenage mayoral candidates disappeared from local papers. Bold forecasts for thousands of boys descending on Winona Lake fizzled. The boys’ bank, grocery store and post office closed for good. An unnatural quiet enveloped the wooded hills. It hovered above the deserted athletic field and snaked its way to the water’s edge to linger among forlorn boat piers. Melancholy waves lapped the desolate beach.

In the summer of 1916, Boy City was recalled to life when the “Witter boys” arrived in Winona Lake. John Witter, a sincere, soft-spoken man and superintendent of the Chicago Boy’s Club, led a band of seventy-five ragtag boys through the Winona Assembly to the camp. Bystanders smiled at the heartwarming procession on its way to founding what would become a lasting model municipality.

Mornings began with reveille. A shrill trumpet signaled an early swim, followed by a flag raising ceremony and then a feast of eggs, pancakes, bacon, fruit and cool buttermilk. The Witter boys—a picture of America’s melting pot—learned to bait a hook and row a boat. They enjoyed swimming and diving lessons. Youth from a congested, hectic metropolis waded into Cherry Creek to catch bullfrogs and snapping turtles. They picked raspberries and mulberries and learned to differentiate between oaks, elms, pines and maples. For ten blissful days, boys from impoverished families worked a vegetable garden and gathered eggs from a chicken coop. Nature studies brought them into close contact with blue herons, red hawks, barred owls, warblers and finches. Locals pitched in by generously providing barrels of apples, fresh baked cookies and canned goods. Women’s sewing circles got to work making new garments for the boys and patching tattered ones.

For the first time in their lives, this group of boys from different faiths experienced the magic of a campfire.  Every night they gathered in a circle to share stories, sing hymns and say their prayers.

When it came time to return to Chicago, the boys marched in their new clothes across the Assembly grounds to the train station. Theirs was a parade of energetic youngsters lugging jars of wild berries, clutching leaf collections and hauling pet turtles and frogs in small wooden crates. Every boy’s pockets overflowed with an assortment of feathers, rocks, shells and sticks.  

The Witter boys represented a mixture of races and creeds of underprivileged kids, often the sons of immigrants whose mothers and fathers worked in factories made busy by the onset of WWI in Europe. A sudden rise in juvenile delinquency at this time troubled John Witter, so he set about finding a respite for troubled boys roaming the streets of Chicago. His search had led him to Brown's abandoned Boy City on the southern edge of Winona Lake.

The first Boy City had ended precipitously with the termination of that infamous rascal Willis Brown. Nevertheless, Sol Dickey did not give up on the nation’s boy problem created by an increasingly industrialized America. In 1916, he welcomed John Witter, a man who had been raised on a farm. He brought the boys to Winona Lake and taught them to plow, plant and weed. He and his wife cared for the property and invested themselves in these youngsters.

A benefactor purchased Boy City from the Winona Assembly for the Chicago Boy’s Club to establish a “city” which endured for three generations and which brought thousands of disadvantaged boys to a wooded haven where they escaped the temptation of joining street gangs, interacted with nature, learned important life skills and enriched their spiritual lives.