Clippings on Illinois Women Suffrage Association (Fernando Jones Scrapbook), 1875
Prairie Avenue resident Jane G. Jones was a longtime and outspoken activist for women suffrage and president of the Illinois Women Suffrage Association. These newspaper clippings pasted into the scrapbook of her husband Fernando capture many of the arguments ranging from immigration to taxation used in the waning years of Reconstruction in efforts to secure women's right to vote. The articles also provide insights into the dismissive voice used by opponents to undermine the goals of the suffragists.
See also: Alpha Suffrage Club
Petition to Illinois Central Railroad, 1891
With this petition, the residents of Prairie Avenue joined several ongoing efforts to impose restrictions on the Illinois Central Railroad. As the petition reveals, several had to do with the environmental effects of the heavy railroad traffic on the city and its residents. Equally important was the effort to reclaim the city's waterfront from the railroad, an effort made successful by the 1892 U. S. Supreme Court decision Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. State of Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892). That decision established the public trust doctrine in the United States and led to the city's eventual ownership of much of the lakefront.
See also: Commercial Club of Chicago; Environmental Regulation
If Christ Came to Chicago, Appendix C: Some Curiosities of Chicago Assessments, 1894
In his 1894 book, If Christ Came to Chicago, British journalist William T. Stead openly condemned the city and many of its political and economic leaders for their embrace of and acquiescence to corruption of all kinds. The inequities of the tax assessment system that allowed the politically connected, including the three men Stead identified as the "Chicago Trinity" of Prairie Avenue residents -- Marshall Field, Philip D. Armour, and George M. Pullman -- to pay lower taxes than ordinary citizens, was especially galling to Stead and other reformers.
See also: Annexation; If Christ Came to Chicago
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