File:Boyce Building (7177250753).jpg

English: The Boyce Building in Chicago (1921). It is the only surviving building associated with the W. D. Boyce Publishing Company. The building is generally considered to be a Daniel Burnham design, although this claim has been disputed. Burnham certainly submitted plans to Boyce for the building, but the final product barely resembles his drawings. An additional eight stories were added in 1921. Boyce published the Saturday Blade, a rural newspaper that was one of the first distributed by newsboys. It was the most widely circulated weekly newspaper in the U.S. by 1892. The success of the Blade led Boyce to found his namesake publishing company. Boyce was a labor activist, and invited muckraking journalists such as Henry Demerest Lloyd to write articles for his papers. Boyce also financed a 1896 expedition to Alaska; the discovery of gold on this expedition contributed the the start of the Yukon Gold Rush. According to legend, Boyce was lost in the London fog one night when an unknown scout offered him aid. When Boyce tried to tip him, the scout refused, claiming it was his duty as one of General Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts. Inspired by this act, Boyce founded the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) in this building in 1910. However, Boyce's conflicts with other BSA leaders kept him isolated from most of the early happenings with the organization. Boyce started his own scouting organization, the Lone Scouts of America, which was more focused on the needs of rural boys. It was eventually merged into the BSA in 1924. Boyce was the third person awarded with the Silver Buffalo (after Baden-Powell and the Unknown Scout), the highest honor bestowed by the BSA. Boyce died in the penthouse suite of the Boyce Building in 1929. To this day, The Boy Scout Manual recounts the tale of how Boyce met with the Unknown Scout.