Excerpt from Twenty Years at Hull-House

Originally published by the Macmillan Company, 1912

A Chicago woman writes of her experiences as owner of a house primarily designed to help immigrants

"Her mother's whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances … and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea … and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore."

Chicago by 1890 had become the great "melting pot" of the Midwest. People from many different nationalities found themselves mixed together, living in grimy industrial neighborhoods during a period of rapid expansion of factories and meat-processing plants. Immigrants came from Russia, Germany, Italy, Bohemia (later called the Czech Republic), and Greece. They crowded...