twenty years at hull house

place-names. ) Her father was the Cedarville miller, John Huy Addams,

a Quaker immigrant to Illinois from Pennsylvania. He was a hardworking, rather austere man with a reputation for strict honesty who

eventually extended his business operations into railroads, banks, and

a life insurance company. A political associate of Lincoln, he served

sixteen years in the Illinois legislature, from 1854 to 1870. His wife

Sarah, Jane Addamss mother, died of a fall and subsequent complications in childbirth in 1863. The child was her ninth; five survived her:

Mary, seventeen; Martha, thirteen; James Weber, ten; Alice, nine;

and Jane, two. Martha died of typhoid fever three years later, a shattering event at the time for Addams but suppressed, like many other

personal sorrows, in Twenty Years at Hull-House, where she identifies

her "first direct contact with death" as the death of her old nurse, Polly

Bear, when Addams was fifteen. Addams herself had a number of illnesses in childhood, the most serious of which was spinal tuberculosis,

which left her with a curved spine, a pigeon-toed walk, and her head

cocked to one side, defects of which she was perhaps overconscious.

John Addams, five years after the death of his first wife, married

Anna Haldeman Addams, a widow with two children, Harry, eighteen, and George, seven. Anna Addams was an intelligent, strongwilled woman who read hooks and played the piano, ran her new

household rigidly, and insisted upon a level of culture and even elegance unusual in small-town Illinois at the time.

Jane Addams was hound by what she called "the family claim" to an

extent that she does not reveal in Twenty Years at Hull-House, andprobably she could not tactfully have revealed it in 1910. Her relationship with her stepmother was tense and troubled and remained so

until Anna Addams died at the age of ninety-three. Her oldest sister,

Mary, married a Presbyterian minister named John Linn about the

time her father remarried. Always in fragile health, she died in 1894,

leaving four children and a husband who could not take care of them.

Jane took over major responsibility for the children and became the

legal guardian of the youngest. Alice Addams married her stepbrother

Harry Haldeman when she was twenty-two, over the strong objections

of both their parents. Harry became a brilliant surgeon hut abandoned

medicine to become a banker in Kansas; after his premature death

Alice took over the bank and ran it successfully for many years. Addams

had comparatively little contact with Harry and Alice in later years,