Last year, 481 local women and children fleeing violent or abusive situations were turned away from Aurora’s Mutual Ground, a woman’s shelter, because there wasn’t enough room for them.
This year will be pretty much the same story, but next year should be different.
That’s because the private agency will have a new home in the spring, a fantastic, historic, safe, spacious and well-equipped structure that will house not only needy individuals but a day-care center and offices for a lawyer and a 16-person domestic violence unit from the Aurora Police Department.
Mutual Ground has purchased the Edna Smith Home on Oak and West Park Streets, a 32,000-square-foot structure with a fascinating history.
Frank Hall, who became the first mayor of Aurora when the east and west sides of town united in 1857, built the Victorian home in 1853. He had lived in it only seven years when he died in the Lady Elgin shipwreck on Lake Michigan in 1860.
Then lawyer B.F. Fridley owned the home for 30 years. Mutual Ground’s newsletter Hotline says there were many colorful stories told about Fridley. One tale is that when he was instructed by a judge to give his client the best advice he could think of, he told the man to “jump out the window and run for them woods like hell.”
The next owner, in 1891, was Charles A. “Captain” Smith, owner of a company called Western Wheel Scraper, a manufacturer of road graders. Smith renovated the home to give it more of a Colonial look. After he died in 1910, the home was donated by the family to the Juvenile Protective Association for use as an orphanage and named the Edna Smith Home for Children in memory of his daughter Edna, who had been instrumental in founding that association.
From 1984 to the present, it has been the home of Covenant Christian School and Aurora Community Church.
A striking, two-story portico sets off the front of the building, which is on 3.8 acres of lawn that is dotted with lovely old shade trees and enclosed by a charming black wrought-iron fence.
Inside, antique marble fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate ceilings and hand-hewn timbers recall the elegance of former times.
There is much work to be done, however. Total cost for Mutual Ground to buy and restore the home is $1.8 million. Although the agency closed on the property Oct. 11, funding was in doubt until the last minute.
“State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka came to our rescue,” said Linda Healy, executive director of Mutual Ground. Topinka set them up with a low-interest loan from Merchants Bank.
“We were made aware of the tremendous need for this service, that they were turning away so many women and children,” said Bruce Engle, project coordinator in Topinka’s office.
In fact, Healy said, the Department of Public Aid estimates that 17,851 abused women and children in need of shelter in Illinois were turned away last year. Nationally, every 10 seconds a woman dies at the hands of a loved one, said Healy, who is also the president of the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She likes to point out that there are more shelters for animals in this country than for women.
“Our biggest fear is that some of the women we turn away will end up dead . . . and it has already happened,” she said.
Mutual Ground was founded as a result of a commission set up by Waubonsee Community College in 1975 that gathered representatives of local women’s groups to assess the needs of women in the Fox Valley. The agency now has two sites to shelter victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. These will be combined at the Edna Smith Home.
This new, highly visible location changes the agency’s tradition of keeping its women’s shelter sites a secret, but Healy said domestic violence professionals have discovered that there are actually fewer security problems at shelters with a more public location.
“Nothing is going to stop 1 percent of the abusers,” she said. “The vast majority of abusers, however, offend in their homes. When they’re outside their homes, they act like decent citizens.”
Plus, when the shelter sites were kept secret, abused women didn’t know what kind of place they were going to. This made the wrenching decision to leave home even more agonizing. Now, with the Edna Smith Home, women will know where they can go for help.
“All of us here at Mutual Ground hope we’ll get up one day and go to work and there won’t be anybody here because we will have eradicated sexual abuse and assault,” said Healy, who admits that is wishful thinking. “In truth, the numbers are going up every year.”
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For information on Mutual Ground or to make contributions toward the renovation, call 630-897-8989.
