Her birth name was Eliza N. Atherton. She was born on March 24, 1817 in the town of Auburn, New York. Her maternal grandfather was John Ward who was related to General Artemus Ward, a leader of the American Revolution. Lizzie joined the Auburn Baptist Church in 1829 at the age of twelve. The family lived in Vermont at various times.
In 1837 when she was twenty, she married Cyrus Aiken of Vermont. The couple honeymooned in Boston and then set out by stage and flat boat along the Erie Canal west toward Chicago. Their purpose was to settle on the Rock River at Grand DeTour, Illinois in Ogle County. The area was a colony of Vermont expatriates including John Deere, the founder of the farm machinery company who was a blacksmith from Rutland, Vermont.
Pioneer life was tough on Lizzie and other women in the area. Tragedy struck in her early years in Brimfield, Illinois in Peoria County when she lost all four of her boys to cholera, then her sister, and finally her husband was incapacitated due to illness and their small estate was lost after a move to Peoria. As the start of the Civil War, she both nursed and performed missionary duties among soldiers in the sick tents near Peoria.
During the Civil War, nurses were called "Angels of the Battlefield." Maryland gave us Clara Barton who years after the war founded the American Red Cross. Another famous nurse of that era hailed from Peoria, Illinois.
Early in 1861, a young widow that soldiers called "Aunt Lizzie" Aiken showed up one day at the headquarters of the Sixth Illinois Cavalry also known as "The Governor Yates Legion" near Peoria. She reported to the head surgeon Major Niglas to offer her services taking care of the wounded, building morale, and doing the hard jobs that then as now define nursing.
She also did missionary work, read the Bible to the soldiers, and wrote or read letters for them. She worked without any pay at first and without a military rank as a volunteer. Even when she entered federal service in 1862, her salary was $12 per month when it was paid. "What shall we call this kind lady?" a soldier asked Dr. Niglas. "Call her 'Aunt Lizzie,' we all just call her Aunt Lizzie."
Aunt Lizzie was asked to go to Cairo but she ignored her own safety and followed the unit to Shawneetown, Illinois. In the severe winter of 1861-1862, she and one other nurse took care of between twenty and eighty patients each day by taking two six-hour shifts each day. In January 1862, she was paid a visit one day by General Ulysses S. Grant and General William T. Sherman who wanted to congratulate her for having saved the lives of four hundred men.
At Shawneetown in early 1862 she wrote to a friend, "Twenty-four nights in succession I have sat up until three in the morning, dealing out medicine. I cannot think of leaving these poor fellows if there's any chance of their living. I have, for the last month, written ten letters a week. I correspond with four Ladies Aid Societies."
She moved with the regiment to a new assignment in Paducah, Kentucky at St. Mark's Hospital with "Mother Sturgis," the wife of another officer. Finally when the Sixth Illinois Cavalry went further south into Confederate territory, Aunt Lizzie and Mother Sturgis were left to do general nursing work for Union Soldiers at Ovington Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee and were no longer assigned just to one Illinois regiment.
Before the war, the Ovington had been the finest hotel in Memphis. But during the war, it was a hospital run by six Roman Catholic Sisters of the Holy Cross and six Protestant nurses. Aunt Lizzie was in charge of Ward A with one hundred sick and wounded men. Both armies lost more men to disease and delayed treatment of wounds than to direct enemy fire.
One day she received a note that six hundred sick and wounded had arrived at the Jefferson Hospital in the city and that number included her brother Bertrand so she rushed to find him. She did not recognize him but heard a voice say, "Oh Lizzie, how much you look like Mother." She still did not recognize him because his appearance had changed so much over the years. Lizzie took a leave to take her brother Bertrand Atherton to St. Louis to give him to her other brother Ward Atherton who in turn took him home to Hoyleton, Illinois in Washington County near Centralia.
In February 1864 an invasion force of fifteen thousand calvary soldiers from the north left Memphis to a march on Mississippi. The force was led by Lizzie's old regiment, the Sixth Illinois. Soldiers came by the hospital by the hundreds to see her and to ask her to stay in Memphis in case they might be wounded so that she could care for them later. But her own health was declining and she was sent to another hospital. Through all her own struggles and all her work during the war, she never forgot a promise she made to her grandfather as he was dying many years before to always trust in God.
In June 1865 after the war was over, Mother Sturgis helped Lizzie get back to Peoria. Later that year she went to Chicago to stay with a friend and recuperate. She needed a living so applied for various jobs including at a newspaper. For a year or so she worked at a Refuge for men set up by the YMCA. While one editor turned her down for a job, he referred her to the wife of a Baptish pastor who steered Lizzie back to missionary work. Baptists were a very active church in Chicago in the late 1800s and took on the job of raising money and setting up a board for the University of Chicago in 1892.
Lizzie became a missionary at the Second Baptist Church of Chicago in 1867 and made as many as 12,000 visits to sick people in 12 years. She remained with the Second Baptist Church for the rest of her life and died 38 years later in Chicago on January 16, 1906 at the age of 88. Her career in Chicago was almost as well known as her exploits during the Civil War.
There were many other tributes to Lizzie's life and work from the press in 1906 and this one came from a newspaper called The Christian Herald:
"There died recently, in the City of Chicago, a woman whose career was so remarkable for its' heroic self sacrifice and dauntless courage, that she could be ranked as high as the bravest soldier who does battle for his country. Her name was, Mrs. Eliza N. Aiken, but perhaps this would have an unfamiliar sound to the grizzled veterans; but say, 'Aunt Lizzie' the angel of the hospitals of Memphis and Paducah, and they would raise their hands to the salute, out of respect and love to America' s Florence Nightingale."
Free PDF book "The Story of Aunt Lizzie Aiken" published in 1880, in my Digital Research Library of Illinois History®.
The Chicago Home for the Incurables was built in 1898 (many wrong references to 1889 on the web) and closed in 1959, the Chicago Home for the Incurables was a long-term hospital complex.
Patients were provided with invalid chairs, which they propelled about their rooms or through the long corridors out upon the wide verandas. There were comfortable seats and inviting hammocks and a perspective of lawn and bright flowers, which meant much to feeble eyes and limbs.
The Chicago Home for the Incurables housed the "John Crerar Library." There was a parlor on every floor, a commodious reading room. The men had a smoking room where they could indulge to their hearts' content in the use of their favorite brands.
The University of Chicago acquired the Chicago Home for the Incurables in 1963 and changed the name to the "Young Memorial Building". Since then, It has functioned as a departmental space for the university's architect, security, housing, and administrative facilities.
Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.
The first gas stations along Route 66 were simple curbside pumps outside general stores. By the late 1920s, the Mother Road supported stand-alone gas stations--usually two pumps beneath a canopy with a simple office attached. Over time, gas station buildings became more substantial. Sprague’s Super Service in Normal, Illinois, may well represent the apex of this trend.
By 1931, when William Sprague built his station, most of the nation’s gas stations were affiliated with major oil companies such as Pure Oil, Phillip’s Petroleum, or Texaco. Architects for these companies provided functional, standardized station designs. Drivers could glance at a white building with three green stripes, for example, and know at once that because of the recognizable icon it was a Texaco station.
Like other small entrepreneurs of the time, Sprague took a different approach. A building contractor, he constructed his large, unique, brick, Tudor Revival gas station using high-quality materials and craftsmanship. The result, Sprague’s Super Service, appeared to be part manor house and part gas station, and sold City Service gas. Steep gables distinguished the broad, red roofline. Substantial brick peers supported the canopy. Stucco with decorative swirls and contrasting half timbering distinguished the second story.
Distinctiveness was important—just like brand-name operators, independent operators had to create brand loyalty, even if their brand was their individual operation. They also worked to promote their identity as good neighbors and local producers, setting themselves in opposition to corporations, which they defined as large and impersonal. As road construction and automobile use grew, so did a backlash against its commercialism and the “ugliness” of commercial architecture. The Tudor Revival style Sprague chose for his station, with its historical and domestic overtones, helped to both establish a local, homey identity and promote a conservative, rural aesthetic. In the depressed 1930s, when gas far outstripped consumers, independent operators could use this civic persona to help sell their gasoline.
Visitors can easily imagine the 1930s, when Chevrolets, Buicks, and Plymouths pulled up under the canopy, and the station attendant pumped their tanks full of gasoline at 10 cents a gallon. After buying gas, travelers could step inside and eat at Sprague’s restaurant or pull into the bay and have their cars repaired. These enterprises occupied the ground floor of the building. Upstairs, a spacious apartment, complete with a sun room over the gas pump canopy, housed Sprague and his family. A second upstairs apartment housed the station attendant.
Throughout the 1930s, most people passing through Bloomington-Normal from north or south traveled Pine Street. Traffic was heavy enough to support both Sprague’s and, just across the street, Snedaker’s Station and Bill’s Cabins, another 1930s service station jointly administered with a lodging operation. Pine Street’s heyday was short lived, though. In 1940, the new four-lane Route 66 opened around the east side of Bloomington, siphoning through-traffic off of East Pine Street. Some traffic still took the Business Route 66 into Normal, so the station remained open, but the property changed hands many times as each new owner sought business opportunities with more appeal for local clientele.
The station was vacant for part of World War II when gasoline and repair parts were scarce. Beginning in 1946, immediately after the war, the owners still sold gas and food, but they added other enterprises as well. Over the years, Joe’s Welding and Boiler Company, Corn Belt Manufacturing, Yellow Cab, and Avis Rent-a-Car occupied space at Sprague’s. So did a bridal store, cake gallery, and catering operation. Since the 1960s, these other enterprises have supplanted the gas station function of the building; the pumps were removed in 1979.
Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.
