Jane Addams: The Woman From the Creek Valley
Near Rockford, Illinois
About thirty miles northwest of Rockford, in a small village called Cedarville along the bank of Cedar Creek, Jane Addams was born on September sixth, eighteen sixty. Her father was a state senator, a mill owner, a man of civic weight who had corresponded with Abraham Lincoln. The family was comfortable. Jane Addams grew up expecting, as such families expected, that she would be educated and then do something appropriate.
What her father decided was appropriate was the Rockford Female Seminary, a school founded on the Rock River in eighteen forty-seven that trained the daughters of middle-class Illinois families. Addams graduated at the top of her class in eighteen eighty-one. It was there that she met Ellen Starr, who would become her closest partner.
Eight years later, in eighteen eighty-nine, Addams and Starr moved to Chicago's west side and opened Hull House in an old mansion on Halsted Street. It was among the first settlement houses in the United States, a place where educated women and men lived alongside immigrant families, offering classes, childcare, labor advocacy, and a gathering space for a neighborhood that had no other institution looking out for it. By the early nineteen hundreds Hull House had grown to thirteen buildings.
Addams spent the next four decades building what Hull House became: a national model for social work, a training ground for labor organizers and social scientists, and a platform for her own advocacy against war, against child labor, against the poverty that industrial cities produced in such abundance.
In nineteen thirty-one, she received the Nobel Peace Prize.
She is buried at Cedarville, about thirty miles northwest of where you are standing. The seminary where she studied is now Rockford University.
