Neighborhood House of Louisville: The Early Years, 1896–1901

46 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Neighborhood House of Louisville The Early Years, 1896-1901 Ann Taylor Allen and James F. Osborne, eds. T he following document, written by Mary Anderson Hill sometime in the 1950s, portrays the origins and first years of Neighborhood House, a settlement house founded in Louisville in 1896. A settlement house was a community of educated young people who lived and worked in a disadvantaged urban neighborhood, where they provided services, studied social problems, and engaged in social reform. Archibald A. Hill, Mary’s future husband , and founder and head resident of Neighborhood House, identified himself as a part of “a loosely-organized body of cultured men and women who choose to make their home in the crowded districts of a city, in order that they may use their influence, culture, social position, and dwelling for the good of their neighbors.” Starting in the 1880s, the settlement-house ideal engaged a generation of young intellectuals, whose ideas and achievements had a deep impact on American society. The most famous settlement houses—Hull House in Chicago and the Henry Street Settlement in New York—operated in large northern and midwestern cities. Most historians focus on these well-known examples, and pay little attention to other regions, particularly the South, allotting at most a footnote to Louisville.1 But the history of Neighborhood House adds an important dimension to our knowledge of this American reform movement by showing how southern activists created an institution both faithful to the ideals developed by northern and midwestern reformers and adapted to local culture and conditions. The author of this memoir, born Mary Dorsey Anderson in 1868 in Mayfield, Kentucky, tells us little about herself. But when she graduated from Vassar, an elite women’s college, in 1889, she may have felt the same frustration that Jane Addams recalled so vividly in her account of her early years. “We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people,” Addams remarked in 1892, “who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties . . . their uselessness hangs about them heavily.” Women college graduates, Addams noted, shared this feeling particularly keenly. By 1890, many (though not all) American colleges and universities had opened their doors to women—by 1900, one third of all American college students were female—and the latter two decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the first substantial cohort of women college graduates. Many of these women, dissatisfied with conventional marriage ALLEN AND OSBORNE FALL 2010 47 and domestic life, craved a more challenging outlet for their talents and energies. But they had few options for most professions—the ministry, law, architecture, engineering—were closed to women, and in others, such as medicine, discrimination against women increased during the era. From speakers she heard at Vassar, Anderson learned about settlement houses. Usually organized as communal residences, settlement houses enabled single young women to live apart from their families and engage in useful work amid the social problems they had likely learned about in their college classes and churches. Anderson opted to return to Kentucky and become a teacher, entering the most common professional opportunity for educated young women. But she maintained her interest in settlement work and took her first opportunity to engage in it by joining Neighborhood House in 1896.2 This generation of college graduates—male and female—was attracted to American cities as places to live and work by the dramatic changes that took place in them between the end of the Civil War and 1914. Rapid industrialization created many new employment opportunities that were seized upon by rural Americans who migrated to cities in ever increasing numbers, and by a host of new immigrants, chiefly from Europe, who transformed the demographic composition of urban populations. Many white and native-born Americans viewed these new residents with a mixture of compassion for the conditions in which most of them lived and fear of their supposedly disorderly and subversive tendencies . Immigrants clustered in neighborhoods that more prosperous people had deserted; in Louisville, they settled in areas along the Ohio River threatened by flooding. Within these neighborhoods, housing shortages combined with primitive sanitation and a lack of social...