The 13-building, red-brick urban complex offered these new Americans—who came from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Bohemia, Greece, Poland, and Russia—an avenue to learn marketable skills and express themselves in a community that sought to respect their cultural traditions.
It also sparked an urban garden movement throughout Chicago’s working communities and foreshadowed a later trend of securing idle land for agriculture.
The farms enabled immigrants to “literally sow roots and put their knowledge into the Earth,” validating their traditional skills.
Today we might describe the Hull House, co-founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, as having a “holistic” approach to social reform, a radical concept for supporting immigrants at the time. At its peak, it offered wraparound services including a theater, a gymnasium, a day care, and a kindergarten, and it provided instruction in English, fine arts, crafts, and trades. The dining hall was a hub for intellectuals, like Sinclair, who ate there while researching his novel.
The rooftop of the nursery featured an herb garden, and the courtyard’s paved playground offered a glimpse of greenery in the tenement neighborhood. Still, community members, many of whom had farmed in their home countries, desired more of an opportunity to grow their own food. Because the cramped residential district lacked open space, the social reformers residing at the Hull House began to look farther afield for land the immigrants could farm.
This search led to what might be one of the most noteworthy effects of the Hull House: International Harvester, one of the nation’s biggest corporations, offered the reformers 90 acres for cultivation. Backed by city officials and lauded in newspaper editorials, immigrants ultimately farmed on 20 acres of the site, roughly five miles from the Hull House, on the unused land surrounding the company’s massive factory. The farm operated for eight years—and led to the proliferation of other gardens across Chicago—before quietly fading.
While the story of the Hull House-brokered farms was lost to history for most of the last century, it is currently the focus of “Perennial City: Experiments in Urban Gardening” exhibit at the Hull House Museum at the University of Illinois Chicago, which runs through December 20, 2026. The exhibit asks a question that is proving especially relevant today: “What does it mean to cultivate a city rooted in care and access to land?”
Young people tending plants on the rooftop garden at the Elizabeth McCormick open air school at Hull House in 1912. (Photo Credit: Library of Congress. LC-USZ62-34992.)
Now, as immigrants, non-traditional farmers, and food-insecure populations face diminished access to federal support and arable land, the Hull House campaign to provide a “land fix” for poverty reveals a markedly different approach to social welfare. It offers a unique example of how powerful interests aligned to offer immigrants access to cultivate food on dormant plots as a shared societal benefit.
“I hope people who are doing urban garden work now can say, ‘Oh, I’m a part of a longer lineage that goes back to Hull House,’” adds Ross Jordan, the Hull House Museum’s curatorial manager.
Hull House Leaders Secure Vacant Land for Farming
For the first years of the Hull House’s existence, the immigrants it served did not have access to land. That began to change toward the turn of the century as a movement took shape.
Inspired by relief gardens for the poor in Detroit amid the economic Panic of 1893, and backed by the Chicago Bureau of Charities, Chicagoans began converting modest idle lots into farms. In 1896, some of those immigrant gardeners launched the People’s Friendly Club, one of many social groups that met regularly at the Hull House, and possibly Chicago’s first formalized group of urban gardeners. Even after losing their farming plot across town, the intergenerational club continued to get together at the complex to sing and dance.
Laura Dainty Pelham brokered the land deal with International Harvester. (Photo Credit: Wallace Kirkland, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago)
Hull House theatrical director and resident Laura Dainty Pelham recognized members’ desire to farm again, so in 1909 she founded the City Gardens Association. She soon parlayed her social connections into the deal with International Harvester, Chicago’s largest employer.
Aligned on mutual interests to address poverty through access to land, Pelham brokered a deal with C.W. Price, head of International Harvester’s welfare department, to make 90 acres of adjacent land available for immigrants to grow crops.
This was seen as a way to alleviate poverty by maximizing the productivity of tenement-dwellers and supporting ideals of a verdant “City Beautiful,” according to Nate Ela, a Temple University political science and law professor who pieced together the Hull House-Harvester history for his graduate dissertation and forthcoming 2027 book, Cultivating the City: The Long Struggle to Put Land to Use.
The City Gardens Association raised $13,000 in today’s dollars to drain 20 swampy acres for farming. After International Harvester staff plowed and tilled, the People’s Friendly Club and other immigrants were invited to grow on the land.
Reform movements at the time were known for paternalistic attitudes toward minority groups, using a vocabulary of providing “opportunity” and “uplift” to the needy to advance assimilation. Reflecting common patronizing attitudes of the time, the Hull House reformers expressed the idea that working the soil and providing an escape from subpar city conditions could foster self-sufficiency, industry, thrift, and honesty.
Still, the settlement supported immigrants directly and sought to humanize them in the eyes of the public, and the Harvester gardens program encouraged those from rural backgrounds to express their agricultural expertise by reproducing cultural practices from their home countries.
The corporate magazine of International Harvester lauded the farming effort. “You will find fine even rows of cabbages, beets, and turnips still waiting to be gathered in,” the magazine said in a 1915 article on the project, “and a few of the most enthusiastic gardeners still lingering lovingly over the plots they have learned to look upon almost as their own property.”
With each 150 x 37-foot plot, the first 100 immigrant growers reportedly earned the equivalent now of $1,000 each season, after investing less than a quarter of that. “This is the greatest movement in the ‘back to the soil’ idea that has originated in Chicago,” Pelham wrote.
The food gardens made fine public relations for International Harvester, and the project’s boosters lauded a win-win that provided self-help and kept “idle” city children off the streets. “The necessity for bread lines and other forms of charity have been greatly lessened,” read a Chicago Tribune headline.
The Idea Spreads: Urban Gardens Flourish Across Chicago
Soon, the urban garden model demonstrated by the Hull House began to spread. The City Gardens Association secured land from the Western Electric Company and another 10 acres from a private estate for growing food. After a Chicago Tribune published a reader’s letter offering lots for the cause, Pelham campaigned to convert more vacant spaces for food.
People lined up for a chance at borrowed land. “Two hundred Italians, Bohemians, and Slavs crowded into [the] Hull House dining hall yesterday afternoon to participate in the drawing for free garden plots,” according to a Chicago Tribune article in 1915 titled, “Aliens in rush for city farms.”
“Think of all the land within the city limits that lies idle year after year—and of the use it might be put to,” said Chicago’s director of unemployment James Calley that year. By then, the City Garden Association had three other farm sites in other parts of the city.
The farms enabled immigrants to “literally sow roots and put their knowledge into the Earth,” validating their traditional skills, according to Jordan of the Hull House Museum.
