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Community Corner

Charity Herrington: Geneva's First Mother

While husband James wheeled and dealed, Charity supported church growth and did a little speculating of her own -- all while raising 10 children.

Geneva has numbered many distinguished and distinctive people among its residents over the past 175 years. While some made their marks and moved on, many more have taken up permanent residence in the city’s cemeteries. To honor these long-ago contributors to the city’s success, we’ll be profiling them regularly in this column.

This week, we’ll start at the beginning—not with Geneva founder James Clayton Herrington, but with his wife, Charity.

When the Herringtons first moved from Mercer, PA, to develop the downtown Chicago acreage his father had claimed in 1830, it was Charity who persuaded her husband to move west to the Fox River because the rough-and-ready Chicago speculators were a bad influence on the couple’s eight children. Charity bore the first European-American baby in Geneva—her ninth child, Margaret.

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Her son James became the city’s first mayor.

 Though James Clayton Herrington died virtually bankrupt in 1839, having sunk all his capital into developing Geneva’s first commercial district, Charity continued to actively support civic growth for another 40 years.

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She not only hosted the first services of in her home during the 1830s, she helped raise funds between 1855 and 1868 for the church’s sanctuary, which still stands at 320 Franklin St. Sometime after her husband’s death, she bought and platted the acreage between State Street and the Union Pacific railroad tracks, where the South Third Street retail corridor now sits.

Charity now lies at rest in West Side Cemetery, along with her husband and many of their 10 children. When she died at age 81 in 1879, she owned no cash, a piano, personal effects valued at $160 and undeveloped land around the edges of the city. But she left a rich legacy of service and stability to the city she helped bring to life.

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