most brothers spent much of those early years building, maintaining and updating the buildings at Maryknoll. Michael Hoban, bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, invited Maryknoll to establish a school in the city. In 1913, Maryknoll Preparatory Seminary was founded on Clay Avenue and students attended classes at St. Thomas College. Raymond Lane, who made his profession that year in the inaugural class, wrote that the success of the venture was greatly due to residents of Scranton who supported the new seminary with meals, transportation, and donations. In 1915 the lease expired and the students joined the community outside Ossining for a year. In 1916, Walsh, after some difficulty, acquired 179 acres in Clarks Summit, PA and a school set up in an old farm house on the property. It became known as the Venard for Théophane Vénard. Price took charge of the Venard its first year, taking one of the Teresians to assist the new community. First and second departures to China World War I ended in 1918 and three Maryknoll priests were ready to make the first Maryknoll mission to China. James Edward Walsh, Francis X. Ford, and Bernard F. Meyer along with Price as Mission Superior departed for China on September 7, 1918. Walsh and Meyer arrived first, Price and Ford some weeks later. Their first stop in Asia was Hong Kong (a British colony at the time), to acclimate briefly with the Paris Foreign Missions Society, which was the predominant Catholic organization in China. From Hong Kong, they went to Yeungkong and started their missionary work in China from there. Although he was only successful at learning a few words in the local dialects, Price quickly set the tone for the mission and those that would follow; Daniel Leo McShane led the second Departure Group in 1919. McShanes's first assignment was to assist Meyer. When the Maryknollers arrived, they discovered that Chinese orphanages did not accept infants or sick children. An orphanage was begun in Yeungkong in 1920. McShane was then sent to be the pastor of Luoding and immediately set up an orphanage for abandoned children there, as well, despite local opposition. The abandoned babies were almost all female and traditionally drowned before the Maryknollers built facilities and began offering a few cents for every child. Soon the Yeungkong orphanage was averaging 450 baptisms a year and the Luoding facility close to a thousand. Death of founder