5 files on the desk from Janesville, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Janesville-born songwriter of "I Love You Truly" and "A Perfect Day"; first woman credited with a million-selling song
$1 million
Carrie Jacobs-Bond is the Janesville-born songwriter who put "I Love You Truly" and "A Perfect Day" into a century of American weddings and living rooms. Born on August 11, 1862, in her grandparents' house at Pleasant (now West Court) and Oakhill, she could pick out piano tunes at four and, as a girl, sat down after Blind Tom Wiggins and played his piece back to a stunned crowd. Her father died; a first marriage ended; her second husband, Dr. Frank Bond, fell on the ice in Iron River, Michigan, after a child's snowball and died in 1895. She came home in debt, sold the furniture, ate once a day, painted china, and ran a rooming house. In a Janesville apartment she and her son opened the Bond Shop, and after returning to 402 East Milwaukee Street she wrote "I Love You Truly."
Publishers would not take a woman seriously, so she published herself. Opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis paid to print Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose (1901); Jacobs-Bond drew her own cover art, and the wild rose became the trademark. "I Love You Truly" made her the first woman credited with selling a million copies of a song. "A Perfect Day" (1910) sold some twenty-five million copies of sheet music. She sang for Theodore Roosevelt and later at a Harding White House dinner; Herbert Hoover called her "America's gallant lady of song." Period reports put her royalties above $1 million before the end of 1910, an earnings claim in 1910 dollars rather than a sourced estate figure.
Her son, Frederick Jacobs Smith, killed himself in 1932 while "A Perfect Day" played on the phonograph; she largely stopped composing afterward. She died in Hollywood on December 28, 1946. Bond Park marks the Janesville birthplace. The songs still get requested.
Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Surgeon who founded Provident Hospital; raised and apprenticed in Janesville as a teenager before Chicago Medical College
$8,000
Daniel Hale Williams is remembered for founding Chicago’s interracial Provident Hospital and for a celebrated 1893 pericardium repair—popularly called the first successful heart surgery—after teenage years in Janesville that turned a barber into a surgeon’s apprentice. Rock County still claims the shop-and-academy stretch, and it should.
He was born January 18, 1858—some files say 1856—in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. After his father died he was apprenticed to a Baltimore shoemaker, ran, and worked west. In Janesville he took a chair at Charles Henry “Harry” Anderson’s Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing Rooms, finished school at Haire’s Classical Academy, sang tenor, and played the bass fiddle in Anderson’s orchestra. A customer, Orrin Guernsey, opened his library. Dr. Henry Palmer, Wisconsin’s former surgeon general, took him as apprentice from about 1878 to 1880. Northwestern’s Chicago Medical College gave him an M.D. in 1883.
In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, interracial on purpose, with a nursing school that would admit Black women—Emma Reynolds, turned away from white nursing schools, was in the first class. On July 9–10, 1893, he opened the chest of James Cornish, stabbed in a fight, sutured the pericardium without transfusion or penicillin, and watched the man walk out weeks later; Cornish lived for decades. Henry Dalton in St. Louis had sutured a pericardium in 1891, unpublished; Williams published in the Medical Record in 1897. He later ran Freedmen’s Hospital under Cleveland, helped found the National Medical Association, and died at Idlewild, Michigan, on August 4, 1931. The Janesville tie is teenage years and training, not birth.
Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Born Churchville, N.Y., 1839; raised on Rock River farm outside Janesville 1846–1858; taught in family one-room schoolhouse; died New York, Feb. 17, 1898
$17,000
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was the Wisconsin-raised reformer who turned the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union into a national political force and became the first woman honored in National Statuary Hall for Illinois. Born in Churchville, New York, in 1839, she was six when the family left for a Rock River farm outside Janesville, where they stayed from 1846 until 1858. She hunted, carpentered, kept the journal her mother required, and, when father Josiah went south for his health, took over his volunteer weather readings for the Smithsonian. In 1853 she talked him into building a one-room schoolhouse; she studied there and taught a term in 1858. The building still stands at the Rock County 4-H Fairgrounds and is on the National Register. Josiah sat in the Wisconsin legislature and helped put the first State Fair in Janesville.
Evanston made her famous. She became the first dean of women at Northwestern, then the long-running president of the WCTU, telling the membership to “Do Everything”: the ballot, the eight-hour day, the age of consent, the global union. She logged tens of thousands of miles a year and learned to ride a bicycle in her fifties so she could write A Wheel Within a Wheel. The 1890s clash with Ida B. Wells over lynching and WCTU rhetoric in the South belongs to that same public record.
She died in New York on February 17, 1898, after visiting the little brown schoolhouse shortly before the end. Rock County WCTU bought the building in 1920 to keep it from disappearing. Illinois sent her statue to National Statuary Hall in 1905; the sculptor was Helen Farnsworth Mears of Oshkosh. Janesville kept the school. That is the Wisconsin claim, and it is real: she was raised here, not born here.
Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Founder of Parker Pen Company in Janesville; born Shullsburg
$1 million
George Safford Parker founded the Parker Pen Company in Janesville in 1888 and turned a telegraphy teacher’s side hustle into the city’s signature manufacturer. The Lucky Curve feed made the name travel; the Main Street factory became, in period boosterism, the largest pen works in the world.
Born November 1, 1863, in Shullsburg, Wisconsin, he came to Janesville to teach telegraphy, sold and repaired fountain pens on the side, and hated how they ruined shirts. He started the company in 1888, took a patent in 1889, and introduced the Lucky Curve in 1894. The first factory floor was the upper story of the Myers Grand Opera House at Milwaukee and Bluff in 1891; the firm incorporated in 1892 with W.F. Palmer as president and Parker as secretary-treasurer. He was still teaching while the first pens shipped. By 1908 a Main Street plant was drawing national notice. Janesville kept him when other towns offered deals. The plant moved to East Court and Division in 1920; at the peak Parker employed some two thousand people, second in town only to General Motors.
The Duofold (1921) was his era’s flashy seller. The Parker 51—the pen Eisenhower used on the German surrender and MacArthur on the Japanese—came after his death. He resigned the presidency in 1933, stayed chairman, and died in a Chicago hospital on July 19, 1937, at seventy-three. He is buried at Oak Hill in Janesville. The high school on the city’s southwest side carries his name. European buyers took the company in the 1980s; Janesville production ended in 1999.
Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
American long-track speedskater and three-time Olympian in the 500 meters; born and raised in Janesville
$14,000
Tucker Daniel Fredricks is the small kid from the Janesville Ice Arena who became the American 500-meter man. At 5-foot-6 he stacked World Cup medals, set a U.S. record, and made three Olympic teams without ever treating the Pettit National Ice Center as a hometown story. The ice was Janesville’s first.
He was born in Janesville on April 16, 1984, and learned to skate at the city ice arena. He started on hockey skates, undersized and faster than the roster, then switched to speedskating around age eight or nine because a friend of his father’s took him. He graduated from Craig High School in 2002. In 2003 he won World Junior gold in the 500. In Calgary in 2007 he took the U.S. record down to 34.31 seconds. He collected thirty World Cup 500-meter medals and was overall World Cup 500 champion twice.
Turin 2006, Vancouver 2010—where a twelfth-place finish was his best Games—and Sochi 2014 gave him three Olympics and no podium. He remains one of only two people born and raised in Janesville to make an Olympic team; the other is rower Larry Hough. He married Japanese skater Erika Seo, coached at the Utah Olympic Oval, and came home to the Janesville Sports Hall of Fame. The Gazette told the origin the way the town tells it: Saturday public skate, no grand plan, just a boy who was fast.