Eliza Emily Chappell, the First Chicago Teacher Paid by Public Funds in 1833.

Eliza Emily Chappell (1807-1888), an American educator, was the first Chicago teacher, at Fort Dearborn, paid by public funds in 1833.

The Eliza Chappell School was roughly at Lake and Clark Streets are today.

Chappell was born November 5, 1807, in Geneseo, New York. She was only sixteen when she began her teaching career and over the course of her life helped establish schools in almost every region of the United States. 

She opened a school for small children in Rochester, New York in 1828. In 1831, she traveled to Michigan and began tutoring at a frontier settlement on Mackinac Island. After a few months, she opened a school for mixed-raced Indian children.

Eliza Emily Chappell

Chappell arrived in Chicago in June 1833 with the prospects of opening a school by September. The school was established in a small log house formerly used as a store. There were 25 students; they furnished their own chairs, "but those who were unable to do so had primitive seats supplied them." There were no desks. Some students paddled their canoes across the Chicago River to and from the school. The only teaching tools Chappell had were "maps, a globe, scriptural texts and hymn books, and illustrations of geometry and astronomy."

In 1834, the school was moved into the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Dearborn, on the southwest corner of Lake and Clark Streets. The school was rented from the church for nine dollars a month.

That year, Chappell established a normal school for future teachers, located on the future site of LaSalle Street, for 12 girls who lived on the prairie.

Chappell married Rev. Jeremiah Porter, the youngest child of Dr. William Porter and Charlotte Porter, on June 15, 1835. Porter and Jeremiah first met on Mackinac Island during discussions about establishing a school.

After the Porters were married, they left Chicago for Farmington, Illinois. They moved to Peoria, Illinois, before settling in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on January 4, 1851; they remained there until 1858. The Porters returned to Chicago when Jeremiah became pastor of Edwards Congregational Church.

The Porters were living in Chicago at the outbreak of the American Civil War; they promptly entered the service. As early as the summer of 1861, Chappell-Porter visited Cairo, Illinois, organizing hospitals, distributing supplies, escorting volunteers, and seeing to the sick or wounded. In October 1861, Eliza became the office manager of the Chicago (later Northwestern) U.S. Sanitary Commission, which solicited food, medical dressings, and other supplies for use in frontline military hospitals.

After the Battle of Shiloh in early April 1862, Chappell-Porter recognized that she would be more useful in the field. In July 1863, she returned to Chicago to act as associate director of the Chicago branch of the Northwest Sanitary Commission with fellow humanitarian Dorothea Dix. Most of 1862 were spent in field hospitals at Ft. Pickering where Jeremiah was stationed. Following the Battle of Vicksburg, Porter traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she worked side by side with Mary Ann Bickerdyke. Chappell-Porter and Bickerdyke directed all manner of volunteer field-hospital work, such as cooking, laundering, distributing relief supplies, and—in emergencies—nursing the wounded.

Chappell-Porter followed the U.S. Army to the Battle of Atlanta. Jeremiah served as Chaplain in Battery A of the First Illinois Light Artillery at Ft. Pickering. Porter secured nurses from Chicago, and on orders from medical director Dr. Charles McDougal, escorted the nurses to Savannah. The Porters followed the Union Army through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia.

Chappell-Porter worked closely with Bickerdyke distributing supplies and caring for the sick. Eliza helped treat the wounded in Memphis from the Battle of Vicksburg. After the battle, Porter went through Louisville to Nashville, then on to Alabama, where she assisted Lincoln Clark's wife at Huntsville Prison. She continued her relief work up until Sherman’s Campaign.

Both Eliza and Jeremiah were active reformers. Jeremiah met abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, for an anti-slavery convention, and Chappell-Porter educated children and veteran freedmen during and after the Civil War. She established a school in Memphis for African-American children. She participated in founding a school at Shiloh, Tennessee, for former slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

In Austin, Texas, Chappell-Porter established a Sunday school for freed slave children. "Eliza would have a multitude of little black children packed close as their little wriggling bodies would permit. I seem to see her standing before them in that rude room upon that rough floor her beautiful eyes beaming, her whole face illuminated with love while every eye was fastened upon her face as she taught them of God and His laws, of Jesus and His love." She went on to establish a kindergarten for African-American children in a missionary settlement in East Austin, Texas.

Eliza and Jeremiah were active in the Underground Railroad. During their stay in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the Porter home was the last stop before slaves crossed into the safety of Canada. She regarded it as a "secret service before the Lord". When a fugitive slave and his three small children arrived at the Porters' doorstep in Green Bay in the middle of the night, Eliza suggested housing the family in the church. For four days, the belfry served as a refuge until a sailboat could be procured to carry the passengers to a steamboat bound for Canada.

In addition to her medical assistance, Eliza made appeals to many politicians about obtaining speedier recovery of convalescent soldiers—especially sending those soldiers home to northern hospitals. Chappell-Porter even appealed to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. in 1863:

But it is not for the dead I plead, but for those who still live, and are suffering home and heart sickness in Southern hospitals. We ask that as you are giving furloughs to all veterans who are able and willing to re-enlist from the ranks, you will not forget the sick and wounded veterans, but extend furloughs to them also. 

President Lincoln, do you know that the holding of our sick in government hospitals, is doing more in some sections of our country to prevent re-enlistment, and weaken confidence in our government than all other causes combined?

After her service in the Civil War ended in October 1865, the Porters went to the "Mexican frontier" in Texas to distribute supplies to U.S. soldiers on behalf of the Sanitary and Christians Commissions. Chappell-Porter also opened a Protestant school. She taught in the school herself until the autumn of 1866, when Jeremiah became the pastor of the Congregational church in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. By this time it had been five years since the Porters has settled into a home of their own. In 1868, the Porters returned to schoolwork in Brownsville, Texas, when Jeremiah became pastor of the Presbyterian Church there. In Brownsville, Eliza reopened the coeducational Rio Grande Seminary. After about a year in Brownsville, they returned to Chicago.

Jeremiah was appointed Post Chaplain by the U.S. Senate in 1870 and sent to work at Fort Brown, Texas, on the north side of the Rio Grande. In January 1874, the Porters went to Fort Sill in the Oklahoma Territory, among the Comanche and Kiowa tribes, because Jeremiah was the chaplain for Ulysses S. Grant's command. Chappell-Porter "taught the children of the garrison in a day school [Rio Grande Female Institute], gathered the laundresses for instruction and made herself the special friend of everyone in need."

Jeremiah was transferred to Ft. Russell, Wyoming, in 1875. By this time, Porter's health started to deteriorate. After a bout with malaria[1] and pneumonia, her lungs were never the same, making frontier living intolerable. She spent much time away from her husband because she couldn't venture out in the cold. Chappell-Porter was torn between wanting to be near her sons in Chicago, and avoiding the harsh winters; she found any permanent resting place impractical. She spent summers in Wisconsin or Michigan, and winters in Florida, Texas, or California. Even though her health failed her, she kept busy with correspondence and "read with keen interest."

Eliza caught a chill at Christmas in 1887 that developed into pneumonia. She died at the age of 80 on January 1, 1888, in Santa Barbara, California. Memorial services were held in Chicago on January 17. People from all walks of life shared recollections of Chappell-Porter.

Mary Livermore—a fellow member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, journalist, and women's-rights advocate—remarked of the "uniform gentleness and untiring diligence that characterized her," noting "What a power she was in the hospitals" and "It seems to me that her biography, like that of our Lord, maybe condensed into one phrase, 'she went about doing good.'

Jeremiah remained active, giving lectures to large crowds up until just before his own passing in 1893.

Eliza Chappell-Porter is buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.

The Eliza Chappell Elementary School, located at 2135 West Foster Avenue in Chicago, was built in 1937 and is named in honor of Chappell-Porter. The school, formerly known as the Foster and Leavitt site, was named on October 20, 1937, with Elvira Fox as the elected principal. A plaque was placed in Chappell-Porter's honor at the southwest corner of State and Wacker Streets, acknowledging the first public school in Chicago in 1833.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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[1] Malaria was a common disease in Chicagoland and southern Illinois in pioneer days, wherever swamps, ponds, and wet bottomlands allowed mosquitoes to thrive; the illness was called ague, or bilious fever when liver function became impaired; medical historians believe that the disease came from Europe with early explorers around 1500; early travel accounts and letters from the Midwest reports of the ague (a fever or shivering fit), such as those of Jerry Church and Roland Tinkham, the details of which are extracted from their writings:

From the Journal of Jerry Church, when he had "A Touch of the Ague" in 1830: ...and the next place we came to of any importance, was the River Raisin, in the state of Michigan. There we met with a number of gentlemen from different parts of the world, speculators in land and town lots and cities, all made out on paper, and prices set at one and two hundred dollars per lot, right in the woods, and musquitoes and gallinippers thick enough to darken the sun. I recollect the first time I slept at the hotel, I told the landlord the next morning I could not stay in that room again unless he could furnish a boy to fight the flies, for I was tired out myself; and not only that, but I had lost at least half a pint of blood. The landlord said that he would remove the musquitoes the next night with smoke. He did so, and after that, I was not troubled so much with them. We stayed there a few days, but they held the property so high that we did not purchase any. The River Raisin is a small stream of water, something similar to what the Yankees would call a brook. I was very much disappointed in the appearance of the country when I arrived there, for I anticipated finding something great, and did not know but that I might on the River Raisin find the article growing on trees! But it was all a mistake, for it was rather a poor section of the country. ...We then passed on to Chicago, and there I left my fair lady-traveler and her brother, and steered my course for Ottawa, in the county of Lasalle, Illinois. Arrived there, I put up at the widow Pembrook`s, near the town, and intended to make her house my home for some time. I kept trading round in the neighborhood for some time, and at last, was taken with a violent chill and fever, and had to take my bed at the widow`s, send for a doctor, and commence taking medicine; but it all did not do me much good. I kept getting weaker every day, and after I had eaten up all the doctor-stuff the old doctor had, pretty much, he told me that it was a very stubborn case, and he did not know as he could remove it, and thought it best to have counsel. So I sent for another doctor, and they both attended to me for some time. I still kept getting worse and became so delirious as not to know anything for fifteen hours. I, at last, came to and felt relieved. After that, I began to feel better and concluded that I would not take any more medicine of any kind, and I told my landlady what I had resolved. She said that I would surely die if I did not follow the directions of the doctor. I told her that I could not help it; that all they would have to do was to bury me, for my mind was made up. In a few days, I began to gain strength, and in a short time, I got so that I could walkabout. I then concluded that the quicker I could get out of those "Diggins" the better it would be for me. So I told my landlady that my intention was to take my horse and wagon and try to get to St. Louis; for I did not think that I could live long in that country, and concluded I must go further south. I accordingly had my trunk re-packed and made a move. I did not travel far in a day, but at last arrived at St. Louis, very feeble and weak, and did not care much how the world went at that time. However, I thought I had better try and live as long as there was any chance. 

From a letter by Roland Tinkham, a relative of Gurdon. S. Hubbard, describing his observations of malaria during a trip to Chicago in the summer of 1831: ...the fact cannot be controverted that on the streams and wet places the water and air are unwholesome, and the people are sickly. In the villages and thickly settled places, it is not so bad, but it is a fact that in the country which we traveled the last 200 miles, more than one-half the people are sick; this I know for I have seen it. We called at almost every house, as they are not very near together, but still, there is no doubt that this is an uncommonly sickly season. The sickness is not often fatal; ague and fever, chill and fever, as they term it, and in some cases bilious fever are the prevailing diseases.