Women’s History
Adah Fulbright: The Heart of Education and Community
Adah Fulbright was born in 1873 in Springfield. Her ancestors arrived enslaved in Springfield with the white Fulbright family and they built the first log cabin in the area. Fulbright received her secondary education and graduated from the original Lincoln School in 1891. After she graduated from high school, she went on to attend Lincoln…
Read MoreBonnie and Clyde in Springfield: Kidnapping, Robbery, and Tangible History
The Depression Era of the early nineteen-thirties is home to many enduring American stories. One of the most famous is that of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the infamous criminal couple who robbed, kidnapped, and murdered their way across the central United States for several consecutive years before their eventual death at the hands of…
Read MoreNotable Women in Agriculture
Around 12,000 years ago our hunter-gatherer ancestors began farming, providing themselves with a larger and more easily accessible food source. The first tenders to these crops would have been men and women, working together to ensure the availability of their food. Since then, we have learned about famous and influential male farmers such as George…
Read MoreThe Sarah Gorham Graham Case
Springfield, Missouri has a history of sensational true crime cases, but one of the oldest is the tale of Sarah Gorham Graham. Sarah was born in December of 1851, and little is known about her until her marriage to George Graham in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1871. George spent most of the first years of…
Read MoreBetty Love, Photojournalist
Betty Love graduated from Drury University in the early 1930’s and almost immediately began her teaching career. She taught art to elementary and junior high school students for almost a decade before finding work at the Springfield Daily News and Leader-Press in 1941. She was meant to be a temporary replacement for their cartoonist, but…
Read More“The Unsinkable” Molly Brown
Born in 1867 and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, Margaret “Molly” Brown would go on to live a life of wealth, adventure, and activism. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Molly Tobin went to school until she was 13 when she dropped out to work in a tobacco factory and help support her family. Once adults, she…
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