Mildred Scott Olmsted, Lifelong Peacemaker

Rose Valley, Delaware County, was home for decades to Mildred Scott Olmsted, one of the most persistent peace advocates of the twentieth century. Born in eighteen ninety, she lived to ninety-nine, and nearly every year of that long life was given to the cause of international peace and justice.

Olmsted worked for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom for more than forty years, directing its United States section from nineteen forty-six to nineteen sixty-six, traveling the world on its behalf and lobbying in Washington through decades of American wars. A Quaker, she saw pacifism not as withdrawal from the world but as demanding engagement with it. She and her husband welcomed leaders including Jane Addams, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King to this house in Rose Valley, making it a quiet center of the American peace movement.