Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard
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.