In 1816, upon the request of Bishop Dubourg of the Diocese of St. Louis, the Superior General of the Brothers of the Christian Schools sent three Brothers to open St. Genevieve School in Missouri. After three years of teaching, the Bishop assigned each of the Brothers to a different location in the diocese, which at that time covered a very vast area. Left to individually face the challenges of administering a school in a new land, the Brothers eventually drifted back to the secular state.

Many years later, on October 10, 1837, Brother Aidant and three other Brothers sailed from Le Havre, France, to Montreal, Canada, and immediately established a school. This is regarded as the first permanent foundation of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools in North America.

Upon learning of the good work the Brothers were doing in Montreal, Archbishop Eccleston of Baltimore requested their Provincial, Brother Aidant, to send Brothers to undertake the direction of the proposed Cathedral Parish School. Because of their limited number and because none of them spoke English, Brother Aidant was unable to satisfy the request. However, he offered to accept candidates for vocations at the novitiate in Montreal where they would be trained and return to the U.S. to conduct schools.

John McMullin, from Baltimore, successfully completed his novitiate in Montreal. He took the name Brother Francis and became the first American Lasallian Brother. In 1845, Brother Francis opened Calvert Hall, the first permanent Lasallian school in the U.S.

Three years later four French Brothers came to New York to take over the school at St. Vincent’s parish on Canal Street. Within a year a small academy was added to the parish school which became De La Salle Institute, an independent secondary school. A boarding academy on the same street later became Manhattan College. In 1850, the Brothers took over the direction of an orphanage in Troy, New York. The following year, the first Lasallian school in Toronto, Ontario, was established.

The Brothers were invited to administer other parish schools in Baltimore and New York and in other cities in the U.S. Academies were opened to provide support for the parish schools and orphanages, expanding the work of the Brothers to meet the needs and the opportunities of the Church in America, which included the pursuit of higher education and the management of perfectories. In 1864, the United States was constituted as a separate province of the Institute with headquarters in New York. In the ensuing years, districts would be created in major geographic areas of the country.