The Shoes That Didn’t Match

At first glance, the photograph looked harmless.

Two girls stood side by side in a Chicago photography studio, arms linked, smiling beneath carefully arranged curls. Their white dresses matched perfectly—lace collars, puffed sleeves, hems pressed crisp. Behind them, a painted garden backdrop suggested prosperity and care. The lighting was soft. The composition balanced.

It was the kind of image that museums labeled charming.

But Margaret Holloway couldn’t stop staring at the shoes.

She had worked at the Chicago Historical Society for seventeen years, cataloging thousands of early twentieth-century studio portraits. She knew the grammar of those images instinctively—what photographers staged, what families paid for, what institutions wanted viewers to believe. This photograph had arrived in a donation box from an estate sale on the South Side, buried among ledgers and correspondence from a defunct child-welfare agency called the Illinois Home Finding Association.

Margaret lifted the print beneath the magnifying lamp in her conservation lab.

The girl on the left wore polished leather button-up boots, new and expensive. The girl on the right wore something else entirely: rough canvas, hand-stitched, the seams uneven, the toe box sagging. The sole appeared layered fabric rather than leather.

Institutional shoes.

Margaret turned the photograph over. In faded ink, someone had written:

“The Moyer twins placed together. June 1919. Success story for annual report.”

Margaret set the photograph down carefully.

If these girls were twins, from the same family, why did only one wear shoes made for orphanages?

She had learned long ago that photographs—especially institutional ones—lied politely. They concealed as much as they revealed. The truth hid in details that had not been worth correcting.

She scanned the image at high resolution and removed it from its cardboard mount. The mount itself bore printed text from the Illinois Home Finding Association: “Building Christian families through child placement.” The studio stamp identified the photographer as Lind Holman & Sons, a commercial outfit operating on South State Street between 1915 and 1923.

Margaret studied the girls’ faces again. Both smiled. But the smiles were not the same.

The girl in leather boots met the camera’s gaze with ease. The girl in canvas shoes looked slightly off to the side, her smile tighter, her posture stiff. Margaret had seen that expression before—in photographs of children from orphanages and industrial schools. The look of someone told to smile without being told why.

She pulled the Association’s file from the archives.

Founded in 1907 by Protestant reformers, the Illinois Home Finding Association promoted itself as a benevolent alternative to orphanages. Its mission was to remove children from institutions and place them in rural homes where they could learn “honest labor and Christian values.” It dissolved quietly in 1927.

This photograph had been part of its promotional material.

Margaret felt the familiar ethical weight settle in. She could catalog the image neutrally and move on. Or she could follow the questions now forming.

If these girls were not twins, what were they?

And why had an agency devoted to child welfare needed to pretend they were?

She began with records. City directories placed Lind Holman & Sons at 438 South State Street, specializing in family and institutional portraiture. The Association’s office had been on West Adams Street, near Hull House and other Progressive-era reform centers—part of a tightly connected network of social agencies.

Margaret contacted Dr. Robert Chen, a historian at Northwestern who specialized in early social-welfare movements. She sent him the scan.

He called within an hour.

“I know this organization,” he said carefully. “They were part of the Orphan Train network, but they focused on local placements. They advertised heavily to rural families—promising Christian guidance and domestic help. Officially, it was adoption or foster care. Functionally, it was labor placement.”

“Would they fabricate sibling relationships?” Margaret asked.

“I’ve seen agencies emphasize siblings,” Robert said slowly. “It made placements more attractive. Two children, one household, twice the labor. But outright fabrication? That would be significant.”

Margaret turned to public records.

There were no Moyer twins born around 1910. Two sets had died in infancy. One surviving set were boys.

Then she found Lena Moyer.

In May 1919, a nine-year-old girl named Lena Moyer had been transferred from the Cook County Juvenile Detention Home to the Illinois Home Finding Association after her mother was sentenced to the women’s reformatory in Joliet for theft.

No siblings listed.

Census records filled in more. In 1910, Lena lived with her mother, Alice Moyer, a garment worker. No father. No other children. In 1920, Alice was incarcerated. Lena vanished from public record.

Margaret found the second girl next.

Dorothy Kowalsski, age eight, transferred to the Association in April 1919 after her father died in an industrial accident and her mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis.

Also no siblings.

The girls were not twins.

They were two unrelated children pulled from crisis, dressed alike, and photographed together.

Margaret returned to the Newberry Library, where an unprocessed donation from the Association’s board member’s family sat in archival boxes. Inside were hundreds of standardized contracts titled Agreement for the Temporary Care and Christian Training of a Child. The terms were blunt: food and shelter in exchange for labor. Eight-hour workdays. No wages. Renewable contracts.

Correspondence filled the gaps.

In March 1919, Reverend Harold Trimble, the Association’s director, wrote to donors: “Images of siblings placed together generate the strongest response. We must produce compelling visual stories.”

A letter from the bookkeeper in May noted a shortage of actual sibling groups.

Yet in June, the “Moyer twins” appeared.

Margaret found a second print of the same photograph. On its back: “Lena M. and Dorothy K. Successful double placement demonstration for donors.”

She showed everything to Robert.

“The shoes are the tell,” he said. “Dresses were easy to borrow or buy for publicity. Shoes weren’t. Canvas shoes meant a child had already been institutionalized. They didn’t bother to hide it—because they didn’t think anyone would look that closely.”

Margaret imagined the studio. Two girls told to link arms. Told to smile. Told who they were supposed to be.

A “double placement,” Robert explained, meant efficiency. Two children, one household, one contract. Twice the labor.

Their real identities erased for a photograph.

Margaret followed the paper trail further and found resistance, too. Letters from Reverend James Mitchell, a Black pastor on the South Side, written in the early 1920s. He accused agencies of stealing children from poor families, particularly Black and immigrant ones, under the guise of reform.

“These children are not orphans,” Mitchell wrote. “They are taken because we are poor.”

Most of his letters went unanswered.

Margaret compiled everything and proposed an exhibition.

Her supervisor hesitated. Donor families. Reputations. Comfort.

“The controversy is already there,” Margaret said. “It’s just been mislabeled as charm.”

After months of debate, the board approved the exhibition.

It opened in January, titled Hidden Labor: Children and the Business of Reform in Progressive Era Chicago.

At its center hung the photograph. A magnified inset showed the shoes.

Visitors leaned close. They noticed the details. The silence stretched.

Descendants came. One woman recognized the story immediately.

“My grandmother said they dressed her up and told her to smile,” she said. “She said she never felt real in those pictures.”

Margaret later traced Lena Moyer’s life. She worked as a domestic laborer until her death in 1967. Dorothy Kowalsski died in 1953 after a lifetime of housework.

Neither married. Neither escaped the role assigned to them in childhood.

The photograph remains on display.

Two girls in white dresses. Arms linked. Smiling.

Canvas and leather.

Institutional and borrowed.

Not twins—never twins—but bound together by a system that turned children into solutions, labor into charity, and photographs into proof.

The truth had been there all along.

It was in the shoes.

Waiting for someone to notice.