Sarah "Frances" Glessner

Glessner House

Sarah Frances Macbeth was born January 1, 1848, in Urbana, Ohio. The following year, the family moved to Springfield, Ohio. When she was three years old, Frances’s father headed west in search of gold. He remained in California until 1854, before taking a series of jobs in New York, where he worked for fifteen years, visiting the family in Ohio twice a year.

In 1863, the Macbeth family took in a boarder, John Glessner. John and Frances married in 1870 and moved almost immediately to Chicago.

In 1879, Frances began keeping the diary she would write for the next forty years, providing insight into daily life at the Glessners’ house. Her husband would frequently complete diary entries whenever she was ill. Frances was a talented seamstress and needleworker, and visitors to the house may see many of her pieces still on display. She was also a silversmith, accomplished pianist, and avid knitter; she gave away many of her silver pieces as gifts and purportedly knitted more than 500 sweaters for children, employees, and servicemen. She studied with Annibale Fogliata, a master jewelry craftsman of Hull House, and Madeline Yale Wynne, a noted Chicago silversmith. In 1904 Frances set up a workbench in the basement of Glessner House and began producing simple and elegant objects. Her pieces bear her hallmark, a “G” encircling a honeybee, iconography for another interest: bee keeping.

Frances Glessner was also a patron of the fine arts. She co-founded the Chicago Chamber Music Society and in her lifetime was also an active member of the several other social and philanthropic organizations, including The Fortnightly, Antiquarian Society of the Art Institute of Chicago, and its predecessor, the Decorative Arts Society. Proud of her family heritage, she was a founding member of the Chicago Chapter of the D.A.R., the first local chapter established in the country, and also later joined the Colonial Dames. She also attended all rehearsals and performances given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of her greatest passions.

In 1893, William Rainey Harper, then president of the University of Chicago, asked Frances for advice on how to introduce faculty wives to women of the city. The result was Frances’s Monday Morning Reading Class, which met for two hours every Monday from October to May, held at Glessner House. During the first hour, the women sewed and listened to a professional reader; during the second hour, there was lighter reading or a lecture. Membership in the class was by invitation only, and the class continued until 1930, when Frances Glessner’s failing health made it impossible to continue.

France Glessner died at the age of 84 on October 19, 1932. In his memoirs, The Story of a House, John Glessner described his wife with much admiration. “She had a clean and wholesome and orderly mind, a heart overflowing with love for family and friends and for all in any need. Her remarkable sense of the value of color and fabric and form and arrangement were what made our three homes in Chicago so attractive.”