This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If you're about to go shopping for a guardian angel, the Board of Directors of Friendly House in Davenport have some advice for you. While a garden-variety angel will do, it's even better to find one with money.
Friendly House began life as the People's Union Mission, a storefront church started by Reverend Edward Lee in 1895 in the wilds of East Second Street in Davenport. By 1911, in response to a growing social mission, the church had become incorporated as Friendly House, modeled after Hull House in Chicago. It moved into an old frame structure at 1220 West Third Street, with meeting rooms, a gymnasium, a kitchen, and a few apartments.
Support for these social services came from a large volunteer staff and a board of directors which included prominent Davenport civic leaders.
No citizen gave more support than Nathaniel French, a judge and manufacturer in Davenport who adopted Friendly House as his personal crusade. It was French who had assumed several thousand dollars of People's Mission debt so that it could become Friendly House in the first place. It was French who paid for remodeling the settlement house building in 1913. He was equally free with help and counsel whenever it was needed.
Judge French died in 1920, and so was not there to see Friendly House burn to the ground in the early morning of January 16th, 1925. Those in the building escaped, but of the building, the only salvage was three doorknobs and the sidewalk.
That same morning, the Board of Directors met and vowed to rebuild Friendly House, even though there would be only $12,000 in insurance for the building and its contents.
By that afternoon, $100,000 showed up all at once. It was the gift of an angel. In fact, he had been an angel for five years: Judge Nathaniel French. Of course, he had an intermediary, his surviving family, who transferred the money, but this gift spurred others to give, and a year later, Friendly House moved in to the French Memorial Building, a magnificent new $155,000 structure at Third and Taylor Streets in Davenport.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
