If there was one item with which New York City was oversupplied in the decades following the Civil War, it was with children. Thousands of young Gavroches left their homes in the teeming tenements, either willingly or kicked out due to lack of food. Some of them turned to robbery and pillage, forming youth gangs to loot ships in the harbor. Many young girls turned to prostitution, and those that didn’t often made a few pennies street sweeping, clearing paths through the dust and manure covered roads with small brooms so that gentlemen and ladies could walk through without soiling their clothes. Even those children who tried to get an education found the schoolhouse doors closed due to lack of room.
Where some saw crisis, the American District Telegraph Company saw opportunity. It began recruiting young boys to company headquarters at Broadway and Fourth Street, where it occupied eighty rooms on the second and third floors. The largest of these rooms was the Instruction Room, and here boys found their names replaced by numbers, and learned not reading, writing, and arithmetic, but instead were drilled by Mr. Teaguer, the Superintendent of the Instruction Room, in the District Telegraph catechism.
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