The RHS Facebook page is a rich archive of history-related posts by Carol Flynn, RHS Facebook admin and writer until mid-2025. Carol prolifically wrote a wide variety of meticulously researched local history articles for RHS. She continues to write for the Beverly Review and other media sources with articles particularly focused on local Ridge history.
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Mother’s Day – Part 7 on the Hofer Sisters – the League of American Mothers
Today is Mother’s Day, the perfect day to continue the series on Andrea Hofer Proudfoot, the fourth of the five Hofer sisters, who started the League of American Mothers.
In November of 1893, Andrea, 27, married Frederick William Proudfoot, an attorney from Englewood whose practice included legal work with the Chicago Board of Trade.
One of Proudfoot’s wedding gifts to Andrea was an estate in North Beverly known as “Oakhurst” located at today’s address of 9333 S. Vanderpoel Avenue. The street was previously known as Prospect and then Howard Court. Andrea and Frederick moved into the house and started a family; six children were born to them between 1894 and 1907.
Around 1895, Andrea and her younger sister Elizabeth (Elsa) Hofer Schreiber started a school in the Proudfoot home they called the Froebellian School for Young Women. This school trained women to be kindergarten teachers, based on the principles of Friedrich Froebel, a Prussian educator who founded kindergartens in Germany in the 1830s. He based his schools and training programs on the principles originally developed in the 1700s by Swiss educator Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi.
The school incorporated much more than classroom work, giving the women who trained there a variety of hands-on experiences. By 1900, the facilities included: the kindergarten teacher training program; a kindergarten for young children; boys’ and girls’ clubs; a grade school that continued the kindergarten principles and included industrial training in onsite workshops; high school level classes for girls; a playground open to all children; and a summer school program (then called vacation schools) for disadvantaged inner-city children. During the summers, the school also ran professional-level programs for educators as the Longwood Summer School.
Central to this operation were also education and support programs for mothers. In 1895, Andrea formed the League of American Mothers that rose to national prominence. Local Leagues were set up all around the country. Any mother or teacher could join, there were no dues; the League was largely operated and funded personally by Andrea. Groups of mothers met frequently at the Proudfoot home and were involved in all of the school programs.
A multi-year course of self-study for mothers was developed through the League, using materials written by Andrea. The books included “A Mother’s Ideals: A Kindergarten Mother’s Conception of Family Life” for the first year of study, published in 1897; and “A Year with the Mother-Play,” for the second year, published in 1902. For mothers who could not afford to purchase the books, thousands of “travelling libraries” were set up around the country.
Andrea dedicated the first book, “A Mother’s Ideals,” to her own mother, Mari Ruef Hofer. Andrea wrote: “To My Mother – Who has been preserved to the simplicities of life through having child companions; whose duty toward the home has kept her from pursuing schoolishness; who has studied more deeply into the affections than into psychology; and who loves humanity because it has been given an impulse onward through her as a channel, and an impulse upward through her spiritual striving for her children.”
Teachers-in-training boarded at the school. All of this went on in the Proudfoot home. It can only be imagined what a busy place this property in North Beverly must have been.
Related to all of this, Andrea started a new magazine, Child-Garden of Story, Song and Play. This magazine was published from their house in North Beverly, and the subscription price was $1.00 for twelve issues.
Child-Garden was described by Andrea as “the national organ of the League of American Mothers.” Each issue included poetry and stories for and by children, ideas for kindergarten teachers, and a section related to the League with subject matter for mothers’ programs, advice and discussion. Mothers were invited to correspond directly with Andrea at her Beverly address, and many did. Some of their letters were included in the magazine.
Andrea offered educated and practical advice to mothers. In the December 1900 edition of Child-Garden, for example, Andrea advised mothers to ignore advertisements and articles about diseases and “quackery patent medicine concerns” and to get advice from trusted medical professionals when needed. Child-Garden refused to carry such questionable medical content even though it cost them advertising revenue.
Child-Garden offered advice like “we expect too much from punishment – it will not take the place of firm, kind, loving, intelligent watchfulness.” Another piece of advice was that no two people were alike and children should not be forced to conform too much one way or another; they should be allowed to work things out.
Mothers wrote heart-felt letters to Andrea with statements like, "I feel as if you were my friend."
Leading up to a national congress on motherhood in 1900, in which Andrea and the League were expected to play a major role, one newspaper wrote, “Mrs. Proudfoot is a pioneer in the mothers’ work of this country. She is urging the mothers of this land into a higher respect for their calling and demands that they shall put it upon a professional basis through study and demonstration.”
The school in North Beverly ran for about nine years. In December of 1914, there was a curious article in the Chicago Tribune that a fire had occurred in the now-empty building – at the time, Andrea was spending a lot of time in Vienna, Austria, with her children who were there for educational reasons. A neighbor all but accused Andrea of arson, and the article wondered if charges would be forth coming. No more was found on this and within a few months Andrea was back to being prominently mentioned in the paper for heading a Republican women’s group, so apparently the charges were baseless.
This brings us to one more topic related to Andrea and her Hofer sisters – their involvement in politics and the international peace and amnesty movement, which will be covered in the next post.
Well, we're going to go ahead and promote this and keep our fingers crossed. The first BAPA porch concert, rescheduled due to rain, will be held this Friday, May 19, at RHS, on the Longwood Drive lawn – 10616 S. Longwood Drive. The concert starts at 6:30 p.m.
Rain is forecasted for that day, so we'll see – watch this page for updates.
The rain's holding off, so the Porch Concert should go on tonight at the Ridge Historical Society! See you there!
It was a great night.
The first Porch Concert of the year, put on by the Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA), was held at the Ridge Historical Society, and featured the band Beverly Country Club.
The front lawn was packed with people just having a good time.
Memorial Day 2023 – Part 1
The purpose of Memorial Day is to remember the people who died while in military service to our country, the United States of America.
In the Ridge communities, there are many markers and memorials to U.S. service personnel. Here is a list and some pictures of these memorials.
If you know of others in the Ridge area to add to the list, please comment on this post with the locations.
In the next post, we’ll look at the history of military memorials connected to Morgan Park Academy, which started as the Mount Vernon Military Academy in the 1870s. The history was prepared by Barry Kritzberg.
Ridge Park – Six memorial stones, including one of the oldest on the Ridge, installed in 1926.
Graver Park – World War I
Kennedy Park – Korean War
Beverly Park – Connor T. Lowry, Afghanistan
Dan Ryan Woods – Gold Star Mothers
Morgan Park High School flagpole
112th Street and Lothair Ave. – Memorial Triangle
98th Place and Throop Street – Derwin Williams, Afghanistan
111th Street and Kedzie Avenue – American Legion
Memorial Park in Blue Island – Gravestones, memorials, artillery
97th Street and Kedzie Avenue – American Legion Post artillery and eternal flame
Mount Greenwood Cemetery – Civil War veterans’ graves and cannon replica
Mount Hope Cemetery – Civil War veterans section
Beverly Cemetery – Veterans monument
Lincoln Cemetery – James Harvey, U.S. Colored Troops
Mount Olivet Cemetery – “Doughboy” grave statues
Sharing this video from another post – Chicago, 1914, taken from a blimp.
The Ridge Historical Society
Memorial Day 2023 – Part 2
By Carol Flynn, with a thank you to Barry Kritzberg for sharing his historical research
Memorial Day – Part 1 listed many of the military-related markers and monuments in the community. While researching these, the only one that could be connected to the Morgan Park Academy (MPA) was the Memorial Triangle, a small piece of land at 112th Street and Lothair Avenue that contains a marker installed by the cadets of MPA in the 1920s in honor of those who fought in World War I.
MPA started as the Mount Vernon English, Classical, and Military Academy for boys in 1873, when the village of Morgan Park was planned and developed by the Blue Island Land and Building Company. In addition to training for military service, the school promised thorough preparation for business and college.
The name of the school was changed to the Morgan Park Military Academy (MPMA) in 1906. Changes beginning in the 1950s led to today’s school, the MPA that is no longer a military training school and is now a co-educational school from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
It stood to reason that a military academy would include memorials to alumni who served and died in armed conflicts that involved the United States, but none were in evidence now. RHS reached out to Barry Kritzberg, renowned educator and author who, among many accomplishments, taught at MPA for thirty-six years and authored “Morgan Park Academy: A History (Volume I),” published in 2007.
Kritzberg shared some of his history research and writing with RHS. As expected, there were memorials at MPA at one time.
Records show that 1,389 MPA students served in World War I, World War II, and Korea. There are no records for the numbers who served in the Spanish American War, the first conflict after MPA was founded, or the Viet Nam War, the last conflict before MPA discontinued military training.
Seven MPMA graduates lost their lives during the WWI time period. In 1920, the pictures of these “gold star men” were framed and placed in the chapel of the school’s Blake Hall, a building demolished many years ago.
In 1921, trees were planted in their honor, and plaques were installed on the MPMA campus. This was considered a significant move by MPMA at the time, with the head of the school, Col. Harry D. Abells, stating that this established “new traditions for the guidance of our present and future cadets.”
The loss of MPMA men increased substantially with World War II. A total of forty-five cadets and two faculty members lost their lives in service at that time.
In 1943, the 70th year anniversary of MPMA, seven elm trees with plaques were planted on the campus in memorial to the seven cadets whose war-time deaths had occurred. The Tribune ran this poem at the time (June 17, 1943):
Seven honored decades,
Thru years of peace or dread,
Her sons have served our banner
With seven stripes of red.
Seven stars, new golden,
Shine on her roll today
For seven heroes fallen
In conflict far away.
Seven elms, new planted,
Pay tribute to each name,
And in our arch of triumph
Shall hold their endless fame.
Those first seven deaths were just the beginning. In the next few years, forty more U.S. servicemen connected to MPMA died.
Many of them also had connections to the local community. One case study, that of Lt. Donald W. Yarrow, puts a real face on what would otherwise just be a statistic.
RHS research shows that Donald W. Yarrow was born on December 2, 1924, to Paul and Edna Brown Yarrow. He was the grandson of a well-known minister in the community, Rev. Dr. Phillip Walter Yarrow. The Rev. Yarrow family lived at 11156 S. Longwood Drive, in one of the most picturesque Queen Anne houses in Morgan Park.
Rev. Yarrow was from London, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and the pastor of the Morgan Park Congregational Church. He was described as a “militant anti-vice crusader” who ran the Illinois Vigilance Association for twenty years. He staged hundreds of raids on speakeasies and brothels. He was fearless against Al Capone as well as corrupt government officials. Rev. Yarrow was a trustee of MPMA.
Paul Yarrow was a stockbroker, and Edna Yarrow was an active clubwoman and volunteer. During WWII, she was chair of the Morgan Park Red Cross Unit. She served as chair of the Morgan Park Woman’s Club American Home Committee.
At the age of 18, Donald Yarrow was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He graduated from MPMA in 1942, where he had been on the honor roll and had received promotions. He attended the University of Michigan, but one month after his eighteenth birthday, he entered the U.S. Army, and became the second youngest officer to complete the officer program at Fort Benning, Georgia.
According to Kritzberg’s research, Donald was wounded in 1944, returned to combat, and then was killed on March 23, 1945, when crossing the Rhine for “the great drive deep into Germany.” He was twenty years old. His funeral service was held at his grandfather’s church at 112th and Hoyne Avenue and he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where his grave is prominently marked (see images).
In October of 1945, Paul and Edna Yarrow received a bronze star medal awarded posthumously to Donald. The ceremony took place at MPMA. According to the Chicago Tribune, he won the medal for heroic action on February 23 of that year in Germany, a month before he was killed. In establishing an observation post, he and two comrades had to move through heavy enemy fire, and they captured sixteen German soldiers, four mortars, and ammunition.
Also according to Kritzberg, more information on that event had been included in his obituary in the Chicago American newspaper on March 31, 1945. They captured the German soldiers without firing a shot. Donald, however, could not have fired a shot anyway because he was out of ammunition. It was only after taking the prisoners to the stockade that he realized that he had no bullets in his carbine.
Forty-seven elm trees were planted on the MPMA campus during those years in the 1940s. Unfortunately, Dutch elm disease, which ravaged Chicago in the 1960s, destroyed these memorial trees.
MPA records, according to Kritzberg, also list twelve MPMA alumni who were killed in Korea and Viet Nam.
However, it seems that not all MPA graduates who were killed during active service are on the MPMA lists, only those killed during “war years.” One man who is missing from the list, for example, is Grant Fenn, whose family owned the Graver-Driscoll House that is RHS Headquarters, from 1940 to 1946.
Grant Fenn graduated from MPMA in June 1942. The day after he received his diploma, he was appointed second lieutenant, infantry, U.S. Army, and started active duty. He graduated from the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, in 1945 and was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force.
Fenn served in Italy, and for two years as an assistant attaché in Athens, Greece. He was killed in 1951 when the B-36 bomber he and twenty-two others were flying in crashed in New Mexico. He was 26 years old. He was buried in Mount Greenwood Cemetery.
There were other memorials at MPMA that were identified by Kritzberg and several are shared in the attached images.
Part 8 on the Hofer Sisters – Elsa (Elizabeth) Hofer Schreiber
The youngest member of the Hofer family was Elsa, also listed as Elizabeth on the U.S. censuses. She was born on September 14, 1869, in McGregor, Iowa. Elsa was educated as a kindergarten teacher and came to Chicago by the early 1890s, like her sisters and parents.
In July 1893, at the age of 22, Elsa married George Laurence Schreiber, 31, in Chicago. They made their home in Beverly at the house at 1833 West 96th Street that the Hofer family rented when they moved from Iowa. That house, now gone, stood about where the entrance is to Ridge Park. Elsa and George became the parents of six children.
George Schreiber, from New York, was an artist and an educator, who studied in Paris and established a studio in Chicago in 1892. In addition to producing his own art, he was involved in the settlement and kindergarten movements. He was an extension lecturer at the Art Institute of Chicago, and taught classes at the Chicago Commons Social Settlement, where Elsa’s older sister Bertha had started a kindergarten for local children, and then a training program for kindergarten teachers. Schreiber taught classes like clay modeling, watercolors, and crayon work.
Elsa’s interests focused on the role of mothers in children’s development and education. As part of the kindergarten principles put forth by Frederick Froebel in the 1800s, children began learning through play as soon as they were born, and mothers had the key role in this early development. He believed women needed to be educated for this “mother-play” role and developed programs using toys, songs, and activities.
Elsa and her sister Andrea started the Froebellian Training School for Young Women around 1895 in Beverly. They also ran the Longwood Summer School as a special annual program. Programs for mothers were an important part of the school. Elsa supported her sister in starting the League of American Mothers in 1895, which was covered in the previous post.
Andrea and her husband Frederick Proudfoot owned the property at today’s address of 9333 Vanderpoel Ave. that housed their family and boarding students, a kindergarten, and workshops for industrial training programs for young people. This address served as the mailing address for the school while the classes were held at St. Paul’s Evangelical Church at 94th Street and Winchester Avenue, which has an interesting side-story covered with an attached image.
A Chicago Tribune article from August 1898 credits Elsa with running the school and conducting the lectures and classes along with other teachers, including her husband and oldest sister Mari Hofer, the expert in music education for children.
In 1896, the Hofer sisters and Schreiber were part of a huge Christmas program put on for 500 children and more than one thousand adults from the city’s settlement houses. Being a religious family, the focus was on the birth of the Christ child. Elsa read selections from her sister Andrea’s book “Child Christ Tales,” while her husband George used his stereopticon to show pictures of the story of Mary and the manger, the shepherds and wisemen, put together by Andrea. Mari led the group in singing.
Elsa contributed to the magazine “Child Garden of Story, Song, and Play” started by her sister Andrea. The attachments to this post include a short story she authored.
The school lasted about nine years, and by 1910, Elsa and George moved to Salem, Oregon, where the three Hofer brothers were in the newspaper and publishing business. The Hofer patriarch, Franz Andreas Hofer, had died in 1904, and their mother Mari also relocated to Salem and lived with Elsa and her family. There is a newspaper account that Elsa and George invited forty guests to enjoy an evening of folk songs when sister Mari visited in September of 1911.
By the 1920s, the Schreiber family moved to Santa Monica, California, where they became active in the art scene. George was known for his seascapes, landscapes, portraits, and figure studies. He was an articulate defender of the West as an “inspiring field for the artist” because “all here is new” and “achievement is still ahead.”
Elsa died on May 5, 1942, of heart failure, at her daughter’s home in Battle Creek, Michigan. She was buried in Santa Monica, California, with her husband, who had died two years before her. Her death certificate listed her as a practitioner of Christian Science.
The next post will look at the Hofer family’s involvement in politics and the international peace and amnesty movement.
Readers: HELP choose future topics for the RHS page.
Here's a very informal, non-scientific survey for the loyal readers of the RHS Facebook page. Your input is sought for future topics for stories.
1. What topics do you enjoy the most? People/families? Architecture and houses/buildings? Events from the past? History milestones?
2. Do you like series that can cover a lot of detailed information, or do you prefer topics that can be covered in one post?
3. Here are some potential topics, off the beaten path, for series, on which a lot of research has been done. Which would be of interest?
– The cult that called Beverly home.
– Cowboys on the Ridge.
– Artists of the Ridge.
– Diversity on the Ridge.
– True crime stories from the Ridge.
4. What other topics would you be interested in?
Any comments on the RHS Facebook page would be most welcomed! You can always contact me privately, also.
Thank you!
Carol Flynn
RHS Facebook page administrator
Ridge Historical Society (RHS) Helps with Research Projects
One or two people have mentioned an art project called “Invisible Labors” to RHS. We are aware of this project and were involved in its early stages.
This project is one case study from many on how the historians at RHS help people with research projects. RHS has been doing this for fifty years.
The number one research request we get is from homeowners for the history of their houses.
We get involved in many other research projects, also. In recent years, we helped everyone from a local church developing a Land Acknowledgement Statement to an eighth-grade student developing a presentation on Prohibition.
Our research on the Pike House led to Landmarks Illinois awarding it “endangered status.”
We even found the owner of a wedding ring that went missing decades ago. That story made the national news.
Last year, the artists involved in the Invisible Labors project contacted RHS for ideas and information on the history of land usage by women in the Ridge area. We discussed many topics with them, including women farmers and gardeners, Victory gardens at wartime, early women landscaping architects who lived in the area, artists who drew inspiration from the land, and more. We supplied extensive research material to them.
We introduced them to the Native Americans who lived on the Ridge, the Potawatomi people who lived off the land and today still make baskets from black ash trees. RHS researcher/writer Carol Flynn’s series on the Native Americans on the Ridge appeared on Facebook and in the Beverly Review.
We introduced them to artist Louise Barwick, who lived on the Ridge and painted many watercolors of local scenes. Miss Barwick’s biggest accomplishment was a giant relief map of Illinois displayed at the 1893 World’s Fair, which unfortunately has been lost to time, but a picture of it exists. RHS published a lengthy piece on Louise Barwick in 2015. RHS has a large collection of Miss Barwick’s paintings which we have exhibited several times and will show again for this year’s Beverly Art Walk.
We introduced them to Kate Starr Kellogg and her sister Alice Kellogg Tyler. These women did not live in Beverly; their father owned the land where Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park is now located, and the family farmed there. Kate was an educator; Kellogg School in North Beverly is named for her, although she did not teach in any schools connected to the Ridge. There is extensive research information available on Kate Starr Kellogg. Alice was the artist in the family. Material on the Kellogg sisters was published in the past as part of the RHS Facebook series on people for whom schools on the Ridge are named.
The Native American basket makers, Louise Barwick, and the Kellogg sisters appear to be the final topics of this project. We’re happy to see a project come to fruition, although we have not reviewed the final text or seen the final product so we cannot comment on it.
Anyone wanting help with research can contact RHS through our Facebook page or through regular email or phone (ridgehistory@hotmail.com; 773/881-1675).