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.