Background
Mary Eliza McDowell was born in Cincinnati. She was the eldest of six children of Malcolm and Jane Welch (Gordon) McDowell. She was Scotch-Irish on her father's side, her earliest ancestor in this country having come to Pennsylvania in the 1730's and moved shortly afterwards to Virginia. Later McDowells went to Kentucky and Ohio, where they were prominent in political, business, and military circles, her uncle being the Civil War general Irvin McDowell. At the end of the war Malcolm McDowell took his family to Chicago and established a steel rolling mill there.
Career
Mary McDowell witnessed the Chicago fire of 1871 and helped in the relief and rehabilitation work that followed. When her family moved to nearby Evanston she met Frances Willard and became active in the W. C. T. U. She also taught Methodist Sunday school, graduated from the school of kindergarten training conducted by Elizabeth Harrison, and observed the work of Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr at Hull House. In 1890 she moved to Hull House, intending to become a permanent resident and kindergarten worker there, but family illness soon called her back to Evanston. Meanwhile a group at the University of Chicago had decided to establish a settlement as a laboratory for the department of sociology, a "window" for first-hand observation in an industrial, immigrant neighborhood. After surveying Chicago they selected the area behind the Union Stockyards, and after consulting Jane Addams they invited Mary McDowell to direct the project. She seized the opportunity, as she later wrote, "to work with the least skilled workers in our greatest industry; not for them as a missionary, but with them as a neighbor and seeker after truth; not to proselyte but to express my ideas of right social relationships. " Thus in the fall of 1894, at the age of thirty-nine, Mary McDowell began her life work as head resident of the University of Chicago Settlement. Moving into Packingtown, the area "back of the yards, " she lived for two years in a tiny tenement apartment, making friends with neighborhood children and their parents. In 1896 she and a few resident workers moved to more spacious quarters over a feed store and later, in 1906, to the newly constructed settlement building on Gross Avenue (later renamed McDowell Avenue).
In time they added a gymnasium, playground, and summer camp and enlarged the settlement program by offering training in arts and crafts, sewing, and cooking, by forming musical, literary, and theatrical groups, mothers' clubs and teen-age groups, and by establishing a branch public library. Meantime she started a relentless drive to clean up Packingtown an area one mile square, bounded on the north by a stagnant arm of the Chicago River, on the east by the stockyards, slaughterhouses, and railroad tracks, on the south by open, dusty prairie, and on the west by the city garbage dump. She petitioned aldermen for three years before securing the first public bathhouse and the first public park in her crowded ward. When she learned that the alderman from Packingtown was being paid for each load of garbage which he permitted the city to dump in his clay pits and that he left the garbage uncovered to decompose and add its odor to fumes from the stockyards and heavy smoke from the railroads, she obtained a temporary court injunction to prevent the dumping. Then in the summer of 1911 she visited European cities to investigate their methods of garbage disposal. Upon her return she launched an intensive civic campaign which resulted in the appointment of a City Waste Commission, of which she was a member, and the city council's decision to build a system of incinerators. She also led a crusade against Bubbly Creek, the stagnant branch of the Chicago River, which was clogged with refuse from Packingtown and the stockyards. After years of agitating about this menace, and greatly helped in her campaign by Upton Sinclair's exposé in The Jungle, she finally persuaded the city and the packers jointly to finance construction of an intercepting sewer. In 1923, when the reform mayor William E. Dever was elected, he chose as his commissioner of public welfare Mary McDowell, the victorious "Garbage Lady, " the "Duchess of Bubbly Creek. " She initiated a number of changes in the department, but all were abandoned when the notorious William Hale Thompson regime returned to office in 1927. Always a firm friend of organized labor, Mary McDowell encouraged the formation of stockyard unions. In stockyard strikes she helped to prevent violence and acted as liaison between union spokesmen and packers.
In the 1890's her Packingtown neighbors were mainly Irish and German, but soon Bohemians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks came to work in the yards, and during and after World War I many Mexicans and Negroes. To all these groups Mary McDowell and the settlement staff extended a welcome, offered help in locating jobs and housing, and provided classes in English and citizenship. She worked quietly but effectively for interracial understanding in Chicago through local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Immigrants' Protective League, the League of Women Voters, the Y. W. C. A. , women's clubs, and other organizations. Known for her warmth and sincerity, her responsiveness to human need, her quick Irish wit, and her stubbornness when principle was involved, Mary McDowell continued in active direction of the University of Chicago Settlement until her seventy-fifth year. She suffered a paralytic stroke six years later and died the following year in Chicago. Burial was at Rosehill Cemetery there. Her passing was mourned by countless residents and former residents of Packingtown, who considered themselves privileged members of her unique family.