Career
She was the major contributor in the creation of the juvenile court, along with others such as Julia Lathrop and Jane Addams. Flower was very interested in helping juveniles, which leads to her biggest creation - the Juvenile Court, founded on July 1, 1899 in Cook County, Illinois. Before the juvenile court, children as young as seven were sent to jails with adult criminals.
In 1898, there were 508 crimes committed by children 10 and under, and 15,161 committed by children 10 to 20.
In 1899, when the court was established, the crime rate went down for all children. Lucy Louisa Coues was born on May 10, 1837, possibly in Boston, Massachusetts.
She was one of eight children of Charlotte Haven Ladd and Samuel Elliott Coues. She grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in from 1856 to 1857.
She then worked for the United States Patent Office in Washington before moving to Madison, Wisconsin.
She ran a private school there and taught high school from 1862 to 1863. They had three children and moved to Chicago in 1873. Flower died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 27, 1921 in Coronado, California.
Chicago"s Lucy Flower Playlot Park was renamed in her honor in 2005 (formerly the People"s Park).