Let the record show
Women's ardent activism has assumed historic proportions
March 9, 2005
The first in an occasional series highlighting women who have left
their mark on Naperville, in observance of Women's History Month.
It doesn't take a lot of digging to realize that Naperville adores its past.
Tracing its origins to a pioneer outpost that sprouted from the prairie
in 1831, the community over the ensuing decades has developed its own
unique, lush and dynamic history, chronicled in detail by local
entities and organizations that include Naper Settlement and its
administering body, the Naperville Heritage Society, which promotes
awareness and appreciation of the city's architectural and historical
inventory.
Hannah Ditzler Alspaugh
Lots of us keep journals, often using them as a way to document our days and the times in which we live. Few, however, keep diaries the way Hannah Ditzler did. Beginning when she was 15, Ditzler wrote about nearly every detail of her life. Her scrupulous documentation of her first 25 years — punctuated with scores of fabric scraps and descriptions of where each bit of calico or linen was purchased and the features of the garment for which it was used, each piece hand-sewn onto the paper — filled a 500-page book that now is among the most delicate and treasured holdings at Naper Settlement. Ditzler described her early days in the town, her family's daily rhythms, even the place where her mother hid the treasured sweets and fresh fruit that turned up on Christmas morning. She related who taught school and where and described how her much-older sister, Libbie, took a job providing childcare for the Sleight family, "who lived on a hill on the east side of town," not an extraordinary development in a time when residents of modest means commonly worked for wealthier families in town. She alluded repeatedly to a certain "D.R.W.," a soldier for whom she apparently carried an unrequited torch through her teens and early 20s. D.R.W. came marching home after the Civil War ended, married and moved out of the state. Eventually Ditzler married, as well, at age 42, when she took her widowed cousin, John Alspaugh, as her husband.
In her everyday, approachable accounts of life in Naperville during the middle of the 19th century, Ditzler created a priceless glimpse of a time when a young town was taking shape.
"I would say that her greatest contribution was her record of the pulse of the community, that she was a historian, perhaps before her time," said Bryan Ogg, assistant curator at Naper Settlement. "If she would have come from money or would have had a sponsor, there probably would have been a Hannah Ditzler museum of history."
Ogg is certain that under different circumstances, the prolific Ditzler would have expanded her work to include three-dimensional elements illustrative of her hometown at the time.
"In some ways, she was the basis for future generations to collect history," he said, adding that she provided "a pure record" by virtue of her candid observation and exhaustive writings.
"She was a recorder. She kept meticulous records, not just in her fabrics, but in her accounting of the culture. In recording the life of the community around her, she was an invaluable resource."
Genevieve Towsley
One of Towsley's most enduring impacts on Naperville is embodied in a book that continues selling quite vigorously on the local level. Titled "A View of Historic Naperville," the publication is a collection of columns Towsley penned under the title Skylines during more than four decades as a writer for The Sun.
The book touches on a wide range of topics, from early pioneers to power brokers. It devotes 10 pages to the life and times of Hannah Ditzler and profiles many others who left their mark on Naperville.
While the anthology is a highly visible piece of her legacy, it is just one element of it. She also was a founding member of the Naperville Heritage Society, a wife and mother who began her working life as a schoolteacher.
"Of course, women didn't really work in the (1920s) outside the home, but she was very involved in the community," said Towsley's daughter, Caryl Moy, now a 35-year resident of Springfield.
An early proponent of proactive preservation efforts, Towsley was outraged when the original Pre-emption House was razed with little warning, Moy said. Her suggestion in 1966 to reconstruct the early-1800s saloon and local government building at Naper Settlement took some three decades to come to fruition.
Articulate, pragmatic and focused, Towsley also was widely known as a gracious hostess who sometimes welcomed subjects of her stories into her home, serving them fresh-baked goods. She also was an outspoken advocate of racial equality in a town that showed minimal diversity in the years after World War II.
But Moy said Towsley considered her finest accomplishment preventing the construction of a dog racetrack on the grounds of the old Case property in the early 1950s. She heard about it and wrote about it, and that got people talking about it. And the democratic process took things from there.
"She realized the power of the pen, and she brought out things that people wanted to keep hidden," Moy said.
She didn't always aspire to be a journalist. She was in the office of the old Naperville Clarion newspaper in the late 1940s, paying her subscription bill, and struck up a conversation with its editor, Jim Givler.
"She said, 'Jim, there's no news in your paper,' and he said, 'Well, why don't you write some?'" Moy said.
Towsley passed away 10 years ago Sunday, but her likeness lives on in bronze among the pieces of public art that comprise the Century Walk in downtown Naperville.
Seated outside the entrance to the Barnes and Noble bookstore at Washington Street and Chicago Avenue, her pen eternally poised above an open tablet, Towsley gazes steadily toward the Riverwalk, her expression forever thoughtful.
"She really learned how much history there was in the town, and she was wonderful with words," said her daughter.
Jane Sindt
The Riverwalk in downtown Naperville and the Illinois Prairie Path display some of the tangible endowments of the indefatigable and multitalented Sindt. So does the warm season's weekly open-air market at Fifth Avenue station, where regional growers come to sell their fresh goods during the harvest season. In years past, after she resurrected the farmers market in the city and ended its half-century hiatus, Sindt would preside over the market from a chair set near the gladiolas, her trademark stylish hat crowning her regal white head.
"She was tenacious, and she knew how to do what needed to be done," said Peg Yonker, a longtime Heritage Society member and its second president, after Sindt.
The elegant and outspoken activist was an environmentalist, animal lover and historian who in her earlier days appeared onstage and on the big and small screens as an actress, working with such big-name celebrities as Anthony Quinn and Tyrone Power — "whom she once dated," wrote Sun reporter Lisa Leland in a story that ran shortly after Sindt's death on Christmas Eve 1995.
"I'm thinking of going back into acting," Sindt told another reporter five years before she died, when she was no longer a young woman.
It is difficult to imagine how she would have had time for it, however. For a while she wrote a column titled This Is Your Heritage that ran in The Sun, and she taught classes at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. She conducted architectural tours in Chicago and Oak Park and worked for the establishment of Naperville's historic district during the 1970s.
When old buildings in the downtown area began to disappear, Sindt took it as a call to action. Her efforts led to the placement of numerous aging structures within the confines of Naper Settlement. Yonker recalls it as a challenge for the preservationist in her.
"To move those buildings was a courageous effort," she said.
The announcement of plans to raze the circa-1864 St. John's Episcopal Church to make way for an office building at Jefferson Avenue and Ellsworth Street in 1969 particularly sparked her interest. It was then that Sindt and a handful of others established the Heritage Society and helped raise $40,000 to save the old chapel from the wrecking ball. Now called Century Memorial Chapel, it is among Naper Settlement's most heavily used buildings.
"It was a very exciting project. It was sliced into three pieces and taken through town to the settlement. Everybody came out to watch," Yonker said. "I guess that strengthened her spine and encouraged her to look in the community for other historic buildings that needed to be saved."
