Clara Louise Burnham

 

I bumped into Clara Louise Burnham, nee Root, while researching the Columbian Exposition. She wrote a novel of the Fair called Sweet Clover: A Romance of the White City. Clover is the lead character. The plot is just barely enough to hold the novel together, but, unlike the brief diaries, she describes the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of the Fair--and of the transformation of Hyde Park for the Fair. 

Clara was one of the early settlers of Hyde Park and lived here most of her life. She went to the reunions that the early settlers held in the 1920s. And one of the things that struck me about Sweet Clover, is the lament of the Hyde Parker that “their” Hyde Park was changing.

Clara’s father was a composer most famous for “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys of Marching”, anthems of the Union Army in the Civil War. He moved the family to Hyde Park in 1858 and founded a successful music publishing business, which lost all its inventory in the 1871 fire and had to rebuild from bankruptcy.

During the rebuilding, Clara married a lawyer named Walter Burnham, who was apparently completely unremarkable—at least, to the newspapers. He died young. After that, Clara moved in with her father, spending summers with the family in their cottage on the coast of Maine. In her last years, she lived in the Cooper-Carleton (now the Del Prado). She started writing around 1880, possibly when Walter was ailing and the family was struggling.

She very successful. She published 26 novels, sold half a million copies, and had a national audience. Several of Burnham’s books were made into plays and movies. The movie version of Jewel came out in 1915 and was remade in 1923 as A Chapter of Her Life--directed by a woman, Lois Weber. Clara’s name appeared above the stars on the poster, so her fame lasted in her lifetime. She died in 1927 at the family cottage in Maine.

Burnham was a Christian Scientist and three of her novels took that as a theme: The Right Princess, Jewel, and The Leaven of Love. They were praised by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, herself, who called her a “metaphysical surgeon.” Later, Eddy asked her to change the endings so the romantic couple didn’t marry and finally said that Christian Science couldn’t endorse fiction in any form. That had to have hurt.

Rosalie Buckingham

 

Rosalie Buckingham around the time she's making Rosalie Villa (posted on Pinterest, unknown source)

I feel like a Women’s History Month of women in Hyde Park should include Rosalie Buckingham. She’s famous now from the BBC series about her husband—Harry Selfridge.

She was born in Chicago in 1860 and, though Chicago was small, the Buckinghams were already getting rich. Her grandfather built a grain elevator—and then signed a contract with the new Illinois Central Railway to be the exclusive grain elevator for all IC grain warehousing for the next 10 years. Even though Rosalie’s father died young, the family prospered. Rosalie studied music, traveled in Europe, and was Chicago high society. She was known to put on harp concerts for charity.

As she neared the age of 30 still unwed, Rosalie decided to become a property developer in the rapidly developing Hyde Park Township, which was still a separate suburb. In 1883, she bought two city blocks from 57th Street to 59th Street near the IC tracks and hired Solon S. Beman, who had just planned Pullman, to plan a development.

The plan was for 42 villas (villa = no rooms for live in servants) and smaller artists’ cottages. It included landscaping, a park, infrastructure development (sewer, paved street, sidewalks, lighting) and, on 57th Street, a three-story clubhouse on one corner and across the street an inn, café, and music hall with a business block with all the conveniences—drugstore, grocery store, reading room. The street was to be named Rosalie Court and the café was the Café Red Roses. She broke the pattern of naming things for herself when it came to the little park—that officially is Sylvia Court. Rosalie and her agents believed in marketing, putting out a brochure in 1884 “Rosalie Villas; or, How to Buy a Homestead.” There was a sequel brochure of photos called “A Holiday at Rosalie Villas” in 1889 that bragged that it was a model for development that beautified other cities.

The plans announced in an 1884 Tribune article called for ornamental granite and wrought iron arches on 57th and 59th as the proud owners entered the street, fountains in the park, and shade trees. A purchaser had “the employment of a capable consulting architect to insure a harmonious plan of building.” No rogue houses for Rosalie.

Beman drew up design standards, which is why the street has a similar feel, though it had several architects. The houses were set back the same distance, with a driveway next to each one, leading to a stable behind the house. A few of the lots were divided so no driveway and a few of the lots have attached houses. The idea was that these would be nice homes for the middle-class or get-away cottages for the well-heeled, conveniently right by the IC station, cooled by lake breezes (because the tracks were ground level), and far from the coal soot etc. of downtown Chicago. They could even commute on the cable car. 

The houses sold quickly—and Rosalie was quickly out of the real estate business and ready for her next adventure--marrying Selfridge in 1890.

Grandpa’s grain elevator deal made another branch of the family wealthy as well. Kate Buckingham was one of Rosalie’s bridesmaids and Clarence was one of Harry Selfridge’s groomsmen. Ten years after Rosalie’s death of the Spanish Flu, Kate donated Buckingham Fountain in memory of Clarence. 

(Credit: Hyde Park Historical Society)

Ida Noyes

 

credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-01238], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Ida Noyes lives on in memory because her husband built the truly beautiful hall in her name. I suspect she’s more interesting than admirable (or maybe likable--there seem to be a lot of squabbles mentioned in the newspapers)—but then I haven’t seen her letters and photos yet. 

She was born in 1853 in upstate New York and traveled with her parents and four siblings to frontier Iowa in 1857 at the age of 4. She managed to go to college, getting a degree in 1874 from the State University at Ames. She taught school for a couple of years before marrying La Verne Noyes, who had also been born in upstate New York and had met her at Ames. La Verne had a hay tool business until he saw Ida struggle to handle Webster’s unabridged dictionary, so he invented a wire dictionary stand, that became fairly successful. He sold his hay tool business and they moved to Chicago in 1879, where La Verne pursued his inventing. Ida pursued her interest in art, studying at the very beginning forms of the School of the Art Institute. She was particularly interested in photography.

La Verne turned his attention to other inventions. In 1884, he invented several kinds of adding machines and in 1886 patented (with his engineer Thomas Perry) the Aeromotor windmill, which generated electricity. It quickly became the leading manufacturer of windmills and later electrical transmission lines. In other words, La Verne and Ida were now rich, really rich. They lived in an elegant mansion at 1450 N. Lake Shore Drive. And Ida decided to travel. La Verne was busy, so Ida traveled without him.

She wrote home and took photos (letters and photos in the Regenstein Library), so La Verne got to hear about France, Italy, Egypt, Algeria, Tunis, Israel, Turkey, Spain, India, China, Burma (now Myanmar), Japan, and Hawaii. She took over 2000 photos on her longest trip. La Verne and Ida did get to travel together to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska in 1894 when it was still a frontier.

When Ida managed to stay in Chicago, her interests lay in clubs devoted to improving the lives of high society. The Twentieth Century Club was a cultural and literary club composed of “members from the city’s best families.” The Women’s Athletic Club, founded in 1898, was the first athletic club for women in America, open to the wives of prominent men. She was also an officer in several capacities for the Daughters of the American Revolution. It wasn’t enough to be able to document that an ancestor fought in the American Revolution. One had to be voted in as one of the “right people.”

Then, in 1912, Ida died. La Verne was heart-broken. He decided she needed an impressive memorial that would serve to help women in their passion for self-development and women’s athletics. He decided to donate $500,000 to build the truly beautiful hall at the University of Chicago. Women at the time could not use the men’s facilities and didn’t have a space for recreation, social life, and athletics. Ida Noyes Hall was lavishly ornate, with a lovely pool, complete with sea horses, a gymnasium, a theatre, and lots of gathering places. The Hall opened in 1916. Unfortunately, it’s now part of the Business School Quad and the pool and gymnasium and some of the other features are gone, but the beautiful details and the lovely portraits of Ida and La Verne at the first landing remain.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 5

 

This is the photo that accompanied one of her obituaries in the Tribune and I just love it.

Annie was deeply loyal to her friends and her projects. She continued with the Chicago Woman’s club, which was in high gear after 1900—fighting for the vote and improving the lives of those who suffered in the ever-expanding city. She continued with the Fortnightly Club and her local Fortnightly Club, the Lyceum as it morphed into the Blackstone Library, and she continued with the Helen Heath settlement house. In 1885, she had helped found the Kenwood Evangelical Church, which built a chapel just around the corner on what might have been Hitchcock land, and she remained involved in its organization. The circle of her friends seems to have just kept expanding.

When Hitchcock Hall was ready to open in 1902, 21 years after Charles’s death, 1500 people showed up for the party in the hall. They checked out the beautiful furnishings and the elaborate frieze in the library created by Dwight Perkins and sculptor Richard Bock. Annie and William Rainey Harper stood at the head of a receiving line as people streamed in. The Tribune covered it, commenting, “many prominent people took part in the ceremonies.”

Annie herself hosted the laborers and craftsmen in a party to thank them for their work. Annie, of course, wasn’t done. She continued to take a “keen interest in the administration and equipment of the hall”—and the students. In particular, students remembered “the cheer dispensed” to any of them who were stranded in Chicago over the Christmas holidays. Every year, she invited them all to her house for an elaborate breakfast on Christmas morning.

In 1919, the students helped celebrate Annie’s 80th birthday. George H. McDonald gave a speech, saying that “Hitchcock had been a home to him and that Annie was the mother in it.” He also remembered that, during World War I, the dorm had been taken over by the Army as a barracks and Annie had removed her "treasures"--the furniture from her parents and Charles's books--and protected them in her house.

I suspect that her own finances had gotten a bit difficult by then. She’d worked out a deal with the First Trust and Savings Bank so they bought her remaining Kenwood house and land though she got to remain in the house with the people who had worked for her. Though her resources had been poured into her memorial to Charles and her parents, she was still looking for ways to change people’s lives.

I had found it puzzling to read in her obituary that she had died in Berea, Kentucky. She had no close relatives to move in with and certainly not in Kentucky. It turns out, at the age of 83, she had traveled to Berea to see if she could help Berea College. Berea had been founded before the Civil War as an integrated tuition-free education for the people who lived in the mountains of Kentucky. The state had forced segregation in 1904, so Berea had split into two schools, devoted to offering low-income students an education. As a speaker at her funeral noted, “her ardent spirit outran her failing strength” and she died on her trip. To the end, she was devoted to the idea of giving people without means access to an education.

At her funeral, her active pallbearers were students from Hitchcock Hall. The honorary pallbearers were a crowd of people—her intimate friends and representatives from all the institutions she’d touched. She was laid to rest in Oakwoods Cemetery next to Charles.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 4

Here Annie is seated in a row with William Rainey Harper (first president of the university and a force of nature on the right) and John D. Rockefeller (wealthiest man in America in the top hat). I love the expression of enduring all the speechifying but also, I think, pleasure that she had reached this day. She’d faced down Harper and gotten what she wanted.

By 1889, she was the last of her close family. Her beloved Charles was gone. She kept up her interests in the Fortnightly Club and the Chicago Woman’s Club and supporting the settlement house—saying they kept her from being so lonesome--but she was very aware that she was the “keeper of the mementos,” not just of her family but of a lost Chicago. The city had 4,000 people when she was born. It was over a million in 1890 and doubling every decade. Development surrounded her home, which was no longer a rural oasis, especially after selling off the farmland to support herself. The World’s Fair was about to transform the neighborhood and city.

One change grabbed her attention and the attention of the Chicago Woman’s Club--the plans for a coeducational university in Hyde Park, where women would have the same coursework, tuition, and degree as the men. The university talks about the individual donors, but the Tribune at the time pointed to the organizing efforts of the Chicago Woman’s Club: ”To the Chicago Woman’s Club is due much credit for the favorable outcome of the plans for women’s dormitories. There had been a movement on foot for some time looking to the building of one or more halls, but with no material success until a meeting of the Womans’ Club was held in the spring of [1892]. Dr. Harper appeared before the club and spoke regarding the plans he had hoped to carry out.”

By 1899, Annie had a plan for how to insure that Charles and her father would be remembered. She would donate her share of the real estate that Charles had bought back in the 1860s on the edge of the city to finance the construction of a men’s dorm. That real estate is now One North LaSalle, worth $200,000 in 1899 (about $6 million today). Worth a heck of a lot more now!

The architect she wanted was Dwight Heald Perkins. Perkins was the son of Annie’s childhood friend, Marion Perkins, whose husband had died early. Dwight had dropped out of high school to support the family and happened to get a job as an errand boy for an architectural firm and discovered his calling. Annie paid his tuition and expenses to the architectural school at MIT. He was so talented, he graduated early for a job with Burnham and Root, whose office had expanded in the build-up to the Columbian Exposition. After the fair, he started his own firm.

In 1898, a number of paths crossed. Jenkins Lloyd Jones was the Unitarian minister who sponsored the settlement house that Annie supported. Jones wanted to build a modern building to house a complex of services called the Abraham Lincoln Center. Jones hired his nephew—Frank Lloyd Wright. When Jones found that Wright was hard to work with, he brought in Perkins, who was also devoted to the Prairie School of architecture, to work with Wright. I like to imagine Annie confronting the very young Frank Lloyd Wright.

Now, in 1899, Annie wanted Dwight to design her Charles Hitchcock Hall. So she wrote to the University of Chicago.

First, Harper and the male trustees tried to convince her to just donate money so they could match a grant from Rockefeller. Annie said no—it’s a dorm named for Charles.

Then Harper and the trustees insisted that the architect had to be their standard neo-Gothic one, Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge. Annie wrote back (quoting Susan O’Connor Davis book) “I am not content that the building should be put up as my expression of an adequate memorial to my husband, and as my ideal of what a boy’s dormitory should be, when I have not been consulted at all.”

Harper decided that they would humor her, pretending to consult Dwight, while having the real plans drawn up by their architect. When Annie found out, she rewrote the contract, spelling out her role in approving the plans. In 1900, she sailed to Europe with Dwight and his wife, who had joined the Fortnightly Club, to get ideas.

The exterior of Hitchcock Hall blends with the neo-Gothic theme of the Quads, but the interior was Prairie School. It included a room with the furniture that her parents had brought to Illinois on the Erie Canal and a library with Charles’s books. Annie wrote, “The great satisfaction with anything I place in Hitchcock Hall is that the Trustees promise me it shall remain forever a part of the Memorial." Unfortunately, she apparently didn’t put that in the contract. It’s not clear that anything other than the building survives.

In 1901, she laid the cornerstone. In 1902, when everything was done to her satisfaction, she hosted a party for all of the laborers and craftsmen who worked on it to thank them for building Charles Hitchcock Hall. I think she’d like knowing that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 3

 

[Annie probably actually looked like the photo in Part 2 but I already used that one, so here's her beloved library. You can picture her sitting there with Charles.]

In 1873, only two years after the fire, Annie’s friend Kate Doggett, who was a militant suffragist nationally and internationally, decided to create a club that would meet every other week, dubbed the Fortnightly Club, for a select group of women who hungered for education. It apparently was a big deal to be one of the 12 charter members (there were noses out of joint about not being a charter member) but Annie was one of them, along with several more of her life-long friends. The club basically served for the college education that this generation had been denied. Members researched a topic and presented a paper to the others. Some of them were topics of the day like education or urban life. At a time when it was seen as too manly for women to study Classical Literature, Annie’s papers had topics like "Historians and Biographers: Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Nepos, Suetonius" and "The Greek Commanders in the Persian Wars."

A number of women invited to join the Fortnightly Club had to turn down the invitation because their husbands did not allow them to leave their proper sphere in the home. Charles of course supported Annie. She found the club so invigorating that in 1875 she founded a separate Fortnightly Club in Kenwood, which met the rest of her life. In 1876, a new club formed—the Chicago Woman’s Club. Though somewhat similar in that papers were read and speakers spoke--, the club quickly developed committees and devoted itself to addressing the problems of the ever-expanding city: juvenile justice, educational reform, women’s vote, domestic violence.

The Chicago Woman’s Club was the powerhouse behind the Chicago settlement houses, which provided a wide range of social services. Annie adopted the Helen Heath Settlement House on 531 West 33rd Place, probably because her lifelong friend Marion Perkins was involved. I tried to find information on the Helen Heath Settlement House specifically, but it was in the shadow of the larger ones. The Helen Heath Settlement House was a project of Jenkins Lloyd Jones, minister of the All Soul's Unitarian Church, who did say he was using Hull House as inspiration for his far less destitute part of town. Part of the offerings would be gymnasiums, classes, workingmen’s clubs, industrial arts, women’s “domestic arts,” and support groups. One of the things I did notice is that the services that were noted in the newspapers were a day care for young children of working mothers, a club—not unlike the Fortnightly—that could also act as a support group, and musical performances. The paper noted the children’s appearance in the choir ranged from rags to well-dressed, but their voices blended into beautiful music. I have the feeling that Annie believed that people on hard times needed to feed their souls and lift their horizons. Annie eventually endowed a traveling fellowship in Greek.

A lot of Annie’s appearances in the paper involve fund raising for the settlement house by hosting performances of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on her lawn and balls at the Chicago Beach Hotel. She supported the Helen Heath Settlement the rest of her life.

With the fire, people had moved south from the city and the population of Hyde Park township boomed, particularly in the more working class areas of Hyde Park around 53rd. Annie worried that people without means did not have access to books, so she rented a storefront on 53rd near Lake Park, in the center of Hyde Park, and created the Hyde Park Lyceum—a lending library of books and a place for free lectures. Annie was president but she recruited her friends to donate cash and books and argued that having books conveniently available, particularly for the young, was a critical service. In other words, she argued for the need for a branch library in Hyde Park. One of her friends was Mrs. Blackstone—and so it was through Annie that the idea of the Blackstone Branch Library was born, the first branch library in Chicago.

In the midst of this activity, tragedy struck. Charles became terribly ill from a failing heart for a number of years, developing agonizing edema. He died in 1881, to an out-pouring of grief from his community. In 1883, Annie lost her mother. Most of her siblings were gone. She alone survived.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 2

 

As usual with women in history, what happens is that you catch glimpses of activity and add those glimpses together.

To recap part 1, Annie’s parents were devoted to learning, but her father died when she was 2, her mother supported the family as a tailor in a cottage on the western edge of what was then still a small town—an area of wooden buildings and financially struggling people. Annie met Charles—older, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law--probably at the Presbyterian Church, and entered the life of prosperous middle class in far exurbia in Hyde Park township. Her house was very large, so she brought her mother to live with them in her own rooms--which she furnished with the library of books and mahogany furniture she'd brought in 1837 on the Erie Canal.

Charles and Annie were devoted to each other to a striking degree. They didn’t have children, which I think was probably a great sadness because their friends noted how much they reached out to neighborhood children. Charles was beloved by his friends and esteemed by his legal colleagues. They were Lincoln supporters in the large circle of Lincoln supporters in Chicago. They helped build the First Presbyterian Church of Hyde Park started by Paul Cornell, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In the 1860s, when the Illinois Constitutional Convention was accused of corruption, a reform coalition managed to elect Charles as the president of the convention to clean things up. Annie and Charles moved down to Springfield for two years. Charles was not one of the movers and shakers that were starting to make huge fortunes in the rapidly growing city, but when they moved back, he did dabble in some real estate on the edge of the city. He was doing well enough, of course. They built a large library wing onto their already large house. Charles loved literature, but I suspect it was Annie who thirsted for knowledge. Annie recalled that it was in their library that the South Parks Commission met to spread out all the plans for what would become Jackson Park, Washington Park, and the Midway.

Settled in, Annie entered into the growing social life of the neighborhood and the city. A glimpse of how central she was to that life showed up around 1866, when General Ulysses S. Grant was the guest at the home of Norman Judd. Annie was the one who stood next in the receiving line because she was the one who knew everyone’s name, occupation, and residence in the city.

And then the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed the city to their north—sweeping away the west side neighborhood where she’d grown up, the buildings on Charles’ real estate investments, and the fortunes of many of their friends. The death toll was remarkably low for the scale of destruction, but the numbers of people without shelter, clothes, or food were enormous.

Annie quickly saw that the official aid agency had rules that meant that many from her old neighborhood weren’t qualifying for help. So Annie decided to launch her own relief effort without strings. She enlisted her friend Mrs. Medill, wife of the man who was publisher of the Tribune and just happened to be mayor, to help her reach those "beyond the Aid Society's rules." The Medill house was still standing near where many of the needy were stranded. She wrote to everyone she knew outside Chicago—especially Charles’ friends from his college days at Dartmouth and Harvard—to get them to send donations direct to that address. Her efforts were important enough that the memory of them survived for another 50 years.

Annie was organizing this on her own because Charles was traveling in the fight to get aid for the devastated city. He was one of three Chicagoans sent to Washington, D. C., to convince them of the then unusual act of providing aid.

Given the next phase of her life, I find it interesting that there’s another Annie story about the fire. Susan O’Connor Davis tells a story that Annie went to the burnt out opera house and rescued the set of allegorical statues that had been part of the façade from the rubble and set them up in the grounds, a memory that music would be back. Annie thirsted for culture and she believed that others, not just the rich, did too.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 1

 

Chicago Historical Society photo published in Vol. 36 No. 2 Winter 2003-2004 Chicago Genealogical Society

This is Annie McClure Hitchcock as a young woman. Thanks to the wonderful research by Susan O’Connor Davis and by a diligent relative writing in the Chicago Genealogical Society journal, I’ve learned so much about a woman I knew nothing about. I was poking through the University of Chicago archives and spotted her in a photo sitting next to John D. Rockefeller and wondered who might have gotten the prominent seat.

Her story is the story of the transformation of Chicago from a frontier village to a booming world-famous metropolis and the out-sized influence the early settlers had in shaping the city’s institutions. She deserves a multi-part post. The first part of her life wasn’t that remarkable, but I find it fun to try to picture how different things were when she was young.

Her parents were very early settlers. Her father was Scots-Irish from Ballywalter, Ireland. He came to the U.S. in 1826. He soon married, but his health was not good, so, hearing that Illinois had a mild climate and healing breezes (!!), he moved his family and a large library of books from Philadelphia to the frontier—a boat to Albany, New York, a canal boat west on the Erie Canal, a sailboat on the Great Lakes, to the area of Fort Dearborn. He built the first frame house in Lake County in 1837. The farm went through a series of crop failures in the brutal weather and in four years he was dead. Annie was two.

Her young mother and the five children moved to land they had at Jackson and Sherman Streets, where the Board of Trade is now. The oldest boy worked for the newspaper The Prairie Farmer, until he died of cholera at the age of 16. The mother worked as a tailor. By 1853, the Michigan Southern Railroad wanted their cottage, and the family moved near to the first high school in Chicago for Annie to attend. Meanwhile, in 1854, Charles Hitchcock arrived in Chicago, 12 years her senior, a lawyer, and a Harvard graduate. At some point, perhaps in the Presbyterian church, Annie met Charles Hitchcock.

In 1859, while they were engaged, Charles took Annie and some friends on a ride to the far south of the city, which she remembered vividly (as quoted by Susan O’Connor Davis):

Leaving the city pavements at Twelfth Street, we struck across the prairie, with its velvety turf roads, and following the curve of the shore of Lake Michigan came to the enchanting ground of gravel ridges with deep loam hollows between which tell of receding waters. All of the ridges were decorated with oak trees and wild fruit trees and vines, with wild roses and hazel shrubbery beneath. . . . All the low land had a variety of willows, and every kind of flower that loves to have its feet in water, while the grass fields that stretched between the ridges were blue with violets.  —Annie McClure Hitchcock, “Reminiscences of Kenwood in 1859”

Suddenly, Charles pointed out a roof “rising above a thick grove of oaks” and let her know that he owned it. He hadn’t lived there because it was too far from business. But after the railroad opened stops in Hyde Park then Kenwood, the city was no longer too far away. Annie and Charles moved to 4747 East Greenwood in 1861. They owned about eight acres where they had riding and carriage horses, two cows, chickens, and cabbage and potato patches—and a house for the gardener. They had a few neighbors—mostly professional people retreating to the countryside.

Davis quotes from Annie’s memoir:

“At the corner of Greenwood and Forty-seventh was another swamp, and for the first few years we drove out of our backyard at Forty-seventh and Woodlawn Avenue,” she continued, confirming the marshy conditions of the area. “I had the honor of naming Greenwood Avenue; indeed it was a green wood, much frequented by city children, bent on uprooting the wild flowers and gathering the hazelnuts and wild plums.”

Hitchcock’s law partner recalled that "Mr. Hitchcock's home life was a most happy one....His wife, to whom he was most tenderly attached, shared in his intellectual and social tastes…."This was a home 'beyond compare', from which radiated most gracious hospitality to rich and poor, the highest and the humblest." (quoted in Chicago Genealogical History 2004)

Annie was just getting going. 

Midway Memorial Bench Part 3

The other woman listed on the Midway Memorial Bench is Flora Sylvester Cheney. She had been a teacher in Wisconsin where she met Henry W. Cheney. Henry, a physician, was a graduate of the University of Chicago Medical School. They lived at 6041 S. Kenwood. He was for a time a professor of medicine at Northwestern University as well as a prominent physician--famous enough in his own right that the Inter-Ocean newspaper celebrated his birthday one year along with other prominent Chicagoans who shared the day.

When Flora Sylvester Cheney died, the headline said “Legislator is Dead at 57”—not “Woman Legislator” not “Mrs. Henry W. Cheney” but the unvarnished title “Legislator.” I think she would have liked that.

Flora Cheney was the organizer and strategist while Katherine Goode was the public speaker. I suspect Flora preferred being a force behind the scenes, but also she suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, which undoubtedly took a toll on her energies. 

Along with Katherine Goode, her political base was Woodlawn, starting with the Woodlawn Women’s Club. She was the executive chairwoman of the Woodlawn Community Center for 13 years. She was an organizer of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, the first president of the Illinois League of Women Voters after suffrage passed. She was the editor of the League’s newspaper for 5 years. As her articles show, to her, the importance of votes for women was the faith that women would vote for improvements in education, public health, schools, child welfare, financial rights for women, and the workplace conditions of women workers. As the president of the League, she helped to formulate legislative initiatives. In her time, the League nationally pushed for the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 for maternity and child care.

She ran a number of political campaigns—most notably Charles E. Merriam (famed progressive and urban theorist) for alderman and Katherine Hancock Goode for Illinois Assembly. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that Flora Cheney’s daughter was married to Charles E. Merriam’s son and that Katherine was her good friend.

When Katherine died suddenly of influenza, Flora Cheney stepped in to fill her term. She won re-election in her own right but died of her Hodgkin’s disease a few months later. The obituaries and memorials noted that she had literally sacrificed her health for the cause. In her short time in the Assembly she proposed legislation known as the Cheney Act to set up a commission to deal with the 100 contradictory pages of laws involving voting and registration to eliminate voter suppression. For instance, she campaigned for permanent voter registration rather than forcing voters to go through the process repeatedly.

While Katherine was the one with the University of Chicago connection and the more prominent profile as a speaker, it was Flora Cheney who got the large memorial service in Rockefeller Chapel, one of the first held there.

Goode and Cheney had a national reputation. In 1932, Illinois had four women on the National League of Women Voters Honor Roll of women who had fought for the vote: Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Katherine Goode, and Flora Cheney.

The bench brought her to my attention, but the Illinois League of Women Voters remember Flora Cheney. In 2011, they created an award for the member who exemplifies outstanding moral character and activism and named it for her.

Midway Memorial Bench Part 2

 

The women memorialized by the Bench on the Midway were a team in the cause of women’s suffrage—in the belief that women would vote for creating a better society. Cheney, who had health issues, was the campaign manager, Goode was the public speaker and organizer.

Goode’s full name was Ida Katherine Hancock Goode. She was born in 1878 in Minnesota, became a teacher at the 14, and found a teaching job in Philadelphia, where she married J. Paul Goode in 1901. She moved to Chicago—6227 S. Kimbark--in 1903 when her husband joined the Geography Department of the University. There’s a time in the middle of her activities when they lived in China.

She became a leader of the Woodlawn Woman’s Club and Political Equality League, branches of the city-wide organizations. The Political Equality League was the organizing wing of the Woman’s Club, organizing marches and petitions, teaching classes on political, legal, and economic issues, debating women’s role, supporting striking women workers, and promoting the welfare of children (meaning sanitation, housing issues, schools, etc.).

Women had been fighting for the vote in Illinois since 1855. Illinois granted women the right to vote for school boards in 1891. The women’s clubs organized in every Illinois senatorial district and managed to get the suffrage bill passed in Illinois in 1913. Goode was a frequent speaker at these women’s clubs and even traveled to other states as the invited speaker. In December 21, 1926, Katherine Goode gave the Convocation Address to the University of Chicago on “Woman’s Stake in Government”

She wasn’t the first woman in the legislature. The first woman elected to the Illinois Senate was Florence Fifer Bohrer. First woman in the Illinois House was Lottie Holman O’Neill in 1921. Goode was elected to the Illinois House in 1925. Apparently, each senate district then had two representatives to the Assembly. As near as I can tell the whole district voted for both representatives. I believe her district, the 5th, ran from 43rd to 71st, the lake to State.

Serving in the legislature in the 1920s wasn’t exactly a high-minded joy. There’s an account in the Tribune of a session she spoke at. It’s the closing of the year, so the Assembly is trying to push through lots of last-minute votes. “While these precious closing hours are rushing by amid sweat and tobacco smoke and slithering and bluff and bellow and browbeating and fawning and bombast and some booze, hundreds of millions are being legislated away.” But then “Amid the heartsickening hullabaloo, there are some contrasts. A woman rises from her desk—Representative Katherine Hancock Goode….The hour is late, the heat cruel and Mrs. Goode must be weary, but she meets an emergency gallantly. The member who was to have spoken on the bill that would permit the removal of the Cook County jail from the heart of Chicago is found to be—and here I speak literally—'in no condition to speak.’ Mrs. Goode must speak for him. She does, and she speaks well. Her tone is clear and far carrying but not loud. There is not, as there is about most women when they speak in public, any simper of self-consciousness about her. She knows what she is talking about and so is brief. Her words are well chosen, she is applauded.”

She ran unopposed in her re-election. The Tribune said of her campaign that “she showed that she possessed unusual capacity for legislative work.” But two months after the election, she died suddenly of influenza, to an outpouring of grief.

University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-06411], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Midway Memorial Bench Part 1

There's a bench hidden on the eastern end of the Midway Plaisance that memorializes two women devoted to women's right to vote and to the welfare of the Southside. It's painted dark grey to cover up decades of graffiti

When it was dedicated, it was gleaming white, with a sundial. It was meant to launch the area as a memorial garden to those who made a difference in Hyde Park and Woodlawn.

At one point, the area to the east of the tracks was landscaped. Even now there are quite a few flowering crabs that put on a show in the spring, but the water table is just below the surface and water is flowing through sands toward the lake so the area is often a muddy mess or a lake. It's never used except by ducks and geese.

In the grand Midway Plan of 2000, a number of the ideas came to fruition through the University—the skating rink, the winter garden, the reading garden, the landscaping in front of the Law School, and the “Bridges” of lights and planters across the Midway to make crossing it more friendly. In the plan, the first proposal for the area to the east of the tracks was to have a large circular fountain, large enough to echo the Women’s Garden. The second proposal while the plan was being discussed was a Children’s play area—“an innovative environment…nontraditional objects, plant materials, and building surfaces … to create a dynamic, challenging, and stimulating play area.” At one point, the Park District was talking about a petting zoo. 

The latest proposals on the table is to go with some combination of 1) Passive Parkland (essentially what the site is now but with improved drainage), 2) A Nature Play area with natural components like logs and boulders could be arranged for play and exercise, 3) Inclusive Play much like the playgrounds already existing in many areas of our communites or 4) Active Play areas, for sports like pickleball, basketball, tennis, etc. All in keeping with the original, approved 2000 Midway Plan.

What combination depends in part on whether this will be designated as replacement fro the displaced UPARR (Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Act) land. If so, I'm assuming it needs to go through Federal review. 

By raising awareness for the bench, I'm hoping that it can be restored and given an honored place. Unfortunately, restoration may be as expensive as $30,000.