Elmira Jane Dickinson

(January 9, 1831 – April 1, 1912)

As a four-year-old child, Elmira Jane Dickinson crossed the tall-grass prairie in a wagon pulled by oxen as her family migrated from Christian County, Kentucky, to the central Illinois settlement of Walnut Grove. As a young woman she was tutored within the Dickinson household and became a teacher at the Walnut Grove Academy when it was established in 1851. For the next sixty years, Elmira Dickinson would do all that she could do to change the world one life at a time, and both students and colleagues realized that she was a human dynamo.

A former student said of Miss Dickinson that her "superior scholarship, high ideals and womanly dignity contributed to the nobility of character for many a boy and girl under her instruction." Elmira Dickinson was a remarkable teacher, but she was also a dynamic person of action who could get things done. In 1869 she became the first recipient of an honorary degree from Eureka College, and she made history again twenty years later when she became the first woman to serve on the College's Board of Trustees. She served in that capacity from 1887-1899. Within five years after she was appointed to the Board of Trustees, there were four women serving as Trustees.

In the interim, Eureka's own Miss Dickinson did her part to change the world when she and two other Eureka-area women, Caroline Neville Pearre and Nancy Jane Ledgerwood Burgess, joined forces to found the Christian Woman's Board of Missions in 1874. Within a few short years it was one of the most active missionary organizations in the world. Though she was already in her sixties, Miss Dickinson traveled to Jamaica to do missionary work there; others would go to Africa, China, Japan, and the Philippines.

Miss Dickinson was also instrumental in forming a chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the community of Eureka in 1874. The Eureka chapter was the first to be established in the state of Illinois. (WCTU founder Frances Willard came to Eureka to visit with the chapter to show her approval.)

Selected in 1894 to write the first history of Eureka College ever to be published, Elmira Jane Dickinson – a woman who had been making history all of her life – became one of the few women in the United States at the time to be writing a work of history. In reading A History of Eureka College, with Biographical Sketches and Reminiscences (1894), one gets the sense that to Miss Dickinson the settlement of this community and the founding of this College were not merely accidents of nature, but something foreordained by a higher power and vested with a vital, life-affirming mission.