Ada Douglas Harmon

Ada Dou­glas Harmon

Ada Har­mon was born in Cham­paign, Illi­nois on August 16, 1860 and moved to Glen Ellyn with two of her sis­ters in 1892. Much has been writ­ten about Miss Har­mon. We know, for exam­ple, that she grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois and the Art Insti­tute of Chicago. She was a painter, a stu­dent of Native Amer­i­can cul­ture and the flora of this area, a phil­an­thropist, and author of Glen Ellyn’s first defin­i­tive his­tory: The Story of an Old Town–Glen Ellyn.

She was one of the dri­ving forces in the orga­ni­za­tion of the first pub­lic library in the vil­lage and a char­ter mem­ber of the Anan Har­mon Chap­ter of the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. She used her skills as an artist to cre­ate a pic­to­r­ial cat­a­logue of local flora in the form of 175 water­color paint­ings later donated to the Mor­ton Arbore­tum. She died in her home at 577 N. Park Boule­vard in 1943 at the age of 82.

Miss Harmon’s Glen Ellyn home still stands at the north­east cor­ner of Park and Glen Ellyn Place. It has received his­toric sta­tus from the Glen Ellyn His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety and the Vil­lage of Glen Ellyn. In 1892, this area was a new sub­di­vi­sion just one block from the recently cre­ated Lake Ellyn.