POSTPONED -- “My Views of Life and Death Are Different from Those of Many”: Feminist Susan Lawrence Dana’s Contemporary & Posthumous Impacts on Springfield, Ill., Culture & Race Relations

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This seminar has been postponed to a later date. Registrants will be notified once this seminar is rescheduled.

Springfield, Illinois, heiress Susan Lawrence Dana (1862-1946) is primarily known for her association with architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who built her mansion that annually draws thousands of tourists. Few scholars have explored Dana’s uses of the house for self-realization and activism, or the impacts of her feminism, Spiritualism, and philanthropy. This paper examines Dana and the house as loci of memory, analyzing Dana’s recent reinterpretations as an inspirational figure to illuminate suffragist, civil rights, occult, and aesthetic movements.  I contrast Dana’s fame/notoriety with the obscurity of her ally, Eva Carroll Monroe, the African American founder of the Lincoln Colored Home (LCH) for orphans and the elderly. An important sister site to Dana’s house, the derelict LCH has not been prioritized by politicians or preservationists, when it could become a museum or memorial with assistance from the Springfield historical community or the gubernatorial intervention Dana’s mansion received in the 1980s.

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