History on Display: The Jane Addams Hull House Museum
A few days ago, My Own True Love and I took a few hours off to visit a museum that’s been on our list for several years now: the Jane Addams Hull House museum. Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Hull House stand in the center of a Venn diagram of many of our interests: historical women who made a difference, late 19th and early 20th century reformers in general and the settlement house movement in particular, Chicago history, and the immigrant experience in America.
We were familiar with the basic story of Hull House: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were introduced to the concept of settlement houses, in which middle-class and upper-class reformers “settled” in group houses in poor urban neighborhoods, on a visit to London. On their return to the United States, they founded Hull House* in a densely populated, largely immigrant neighborhood in Chicago’s Near West Side. The settlement house offered a variety of social programs to neighborhood residents. All of which is true, but neither of us was prepared for the sheer scope of the Hull House project.
Hull House itself was only one of a multi-building complex that eventually filled an entire city block.** which is now part of the University of Illinois Chicago campus. Addams and Starr were the leaders of an extraordinary group of women—doctors, lawyers, artists, general shin-kickers—who made the world a safer, better place for women, children, blue collar workers, and immigrants. They helped lay the foundation for the field of occupational health and safety, helped pass laws against child labor, and published a report on conditions in their neighborhood that was the first to blame conditions in urban slums on economic systems rather than on the individuals who lived there. They pushed for an eight-hour work day and introduced art classes to the Chicago public schools. Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, but not every one saw their actions as positive. Addams had an FBI file. The DAR dubbed her the most dangerous woman in America. And the “female führer” Elizabeth Dilling gave her a listing in her infamous Red Network.
At the complex itself, Hull House offered classes in art and music, technical skills, cooking, sewing, and English as a second language. They offered a wide range of services to the neighborhood, including a nursery and kindergarten so working women would have childcare, a public kitchen that served 60,000 meals a year, public baths,** an employment bureau, a clinic, an art gallery and performance space. The complex housed a branch of the Chicago Public Library and the Jane Club, which provided housing for single working women. It also produced its own electricity, and sold the excess power to its neighbors.
The museum tells the story well, with artifacts, photographs, and quotations. You are urged to sit at Addams desk. And, in what is one of the most unusual museum programs I’m aware of, the Jane Addams Bedroom Project, UIC staff, faculty and students are invited to sign up to take a nap in Addams’s bedroom—a practical expression of Addams’s believe that play and rest were important.
If you’re in Chicago, the Jane Addams Hull House Museum is well worth a visit. If Chicago is not in your future, a virtual tour is available at the museum website.
*Named after Charles Jerald Hull, the original owner of the quite astonishing Italianate-style house, built in 1865, that was the heart of the settlement. Since we are old-house nerds as well as history buffs, we were occasionally distracted by the building itself.
** The block was taken over by the University of Illinois Chicago. Only the 1865 building, where Addams lived and worked remains.
***Soon after Hull House opened, Addams learned there were only 3 bathtubs in the 1/3 square mile east of the building. She had 3 public baths built behind the settlement which gave almost 1000 people a month access to baths that were previously unavailable.
From the Archives: More About Salt
Speaking of salt, as I believe we were:
Anyone who sat through a third grade social studies lesson learned that Europe’s search for pepper changed the world. Prince Henry the Navigator, Columbus, and all that. But did you know that salt played an even bigger role in world history?
Unlike pepper, we can’t live without salt. It is as essential to life as water. Our bodies need it to digest food, transmit nerve impulses, and move muscles, including the heart.
When we were hunter-gatherers, the salt we needed came from wild game. (Sometimes wild game got the salt it needed by licking the places where we urinated. The circle of life can be weird.) As mankind settled and our diet changed, we had to find salt from other sources, not only for ourselves, but for the animals we domesticated.
In theory, salt can be found almost everywhere on earth. It fills the oceans, lies in rich veins in rock near the earth’s surface, and crusts the desert beds of long vanished seas. But until the Industrial Revolution, it was often difficult to obtain.*
The law of supply and demand is almost as dependable as the law of gravity. Because salt was hard to come by, it was valuable. It was one of the first international commodities and the first government monopoly.** Merchant caravans carried it across the most inhospitable places of the earth. Governments taxed it. Roman soldiers were paid in it.*** Mohandas Gandhi staged a protest around it.
The next time you pick up the salt shaker, show a little respect.
* The phrase “back to the salt mines” is rooted in that fact that mining salt was dangerous work, historically done by slaves or prisoners. As late as the mid- 20th century, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany used labor in the slave mines as punishment.
** China, ca 221 BCE.
***Hence the phrase “worth your salt”. Not to mention the word “salary”, which comes from the Latin word for salt.
Image courtesy of Carlos Porto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In which we visit a salt flat
When I thought about going on a food tour of Italy, I thought of wine, and pasta, and seafood, and olives and olive oil. I did not think about salt. And once I knew we were visiting a salt flat, it did not occur to me that our visit to the Saline Culcasi salt flats outside Trapani and their related museum would be the most overtly historical stop we would make in Sicily.
Trapani salt flats, with Archimedes screw
The salt marshes south of Trapani are one of the oldest salt-making sites in the world, first established by the Phoenicians in 1500 BCE, and continued by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Muslims and the Spanish. Salt from Trapani was shipped to the Hanseatic League in Bergen, from which it was traded throughout medieval Europe.
When Italy was unified in 1861, Sicilian salt manufacturers found it hard to market their product. The new Italian government, like so many others before them, imposed a salt monopoly that favored producers on the mainland. Trapani salt, once an important export, became a local product, used to cure tuna, preserve capers, and cure olives.* The island economy was not enough to sustain all the salt works, and most of them had been abandoned before the Italian government ended the salt monopoly in 1973.
The Culcasi family took a gamble and restored a salt marsh that had been rendered unusable by mud and flooding in the 1960s. They now operate the flats using traditional methods.** Salt pans are divided by earthen dikes, which are punctuated by stone windmills. The windmills, which were introduced to the process in the eighth century, serve two purposes. They power Archimedes screws*** that move water from salt pans at different levels. They also use wind energy to grind dried salt crystals.
Mound of drying salt protected by tiles
* Food tour!
**They also have a mechanical facility that produces commercial salt on a much larger scale.
***Invented in third century BCE, as you may recall, by a resident of Sircusa. This article from Scientific American gives an excellent description of how the Archimedes screw works: Lift Water with an Archimedes Screw