Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Hull House, named after the original house's first owner Charles Jerald Hull, opened to serve recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had expanded to 13 buildings. In 1912, the Hull House complex was completed with the addition of a summer camp, the Bowen Country Club. With its innovative social, educational, and artistic programs, Hull House became the standard bearer for the movement; by 1920, it grew to approximately 500 settlement houses nationally.
Hull House in the early 20th century
Hull House community workshop poster, 1938
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in 2006. The museum is located in and preserves the first building from which the Addams settlement took its name, Hull House, and one related structure. Additional settlement facilities. which over-time grew up around the house, were removed in the 1960s.
Smith Hall along Halsted St., 1910
The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and social connection. Its main object was the establishment of "settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, English classes, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas. The settlement movement also spawned educational/reform movements. Both in the UK and the US settlement workers worked to develop a unique activist form of sociology known as Settlement Sociology. This science of social reform movement is neglected in the history of sociology in favor of a teaching-, theory- and research university–based model.
Toynbee Hall settlement house, founded 1884, pictured here in 1902
Bohemian immigrant youth at the Lessie Bates Davis Neighborhood House in 1918 in East St. Louis, Illinois
Site of the Communal Club for Working Children, a cornerstone of the Russian Settlement network.