Lydia Moss Bradley: The Widow Who Built a University

Lydia Moss Bradley outlived her husband and all six of her children. She became, by the time she was sixty, one of the wealthiest women in Illinois, and one of the most powerful people, of any gender, in Peoria. She decided to do something with that.

She was born in Indiana in eighteen sixteen and married Tobias Bradley in eighteen thirty-seven. They moved to Peoria when she was thirty-one and built their prosperity through real estate and banking over the following three decades. Tobias died in eighteen sixty-seven. The six children had all died before him. Lydia Moss Bradley was left with money, property, and no one to leave it to.

She became the first woman to serve on the board of a national bank in Illinois, possibly the first in the entire country. She helped found what became OSF Saint Francis Medical Center. She established the Peoria Park District. She was a principal figure in the founding of the Children's Home Association.

Her largest project was a school. She obtained a charter for Bradley Polytechnic Institute in eighteen ninety-six, and the first buildings opened in eighteen ninety-seven, on a tract of land she donated on the city's west side. The school became a four-year college in nineteen twenty and a university granting graduate degrees in nineteen forty-six. It is now Bradley University, with nearly six thousand students.

She also, incidentally, owned the Peoria Pottery Company during its most successful years, having acquired it along with much of its block in the eighteen seventies. The pots the pottery made, with their distinctive brown glaze, went into exhibitions at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in eighteen ninety-three.

Lydia Moss Bradley died in nineteen oh eight, at ninety-one years old. The university is her monument.