Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1912 — Farm Waif Wins Fortune in the City [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Farm Waif Wins Fortune in the City

tered the medical college of the University of Kansas, where on graduation she finished third in a class made up almost wholly of men students. It was the winter of the first smallpox epidemic in Kansas City. She was employed by the city and cared for 2,000 smallpox patients. When she left her position with the city in 1902 she had $2,000. With two partners she invested It in an 11-acre tract near Fortythird. street and the State line This tract was platted in city lots and marketed, and In a year she had her $2,000 back and $5,000 more. Then she put the $7,000 in an adjoining tract of 22 acres, with the same partners, and they cleared $55,000. In the succeeding five years she built and sold 200 houses and cleared more than SIOO,OOO. She draws her own plans, buys her own material and personally “bosses” each job she undertakes, overseeing every detail of thework. In 1908 this young woman of 33, who a few years before had been an ignorant country girl, without money, friends or relatives, paid the penalty of her success by breaking down In health. She was in a nervous collapse and had- to cease working. She lost more than half her fortune before her health was restored.

Kansas 18 m this city a woman, still young, whose ambition was born when she .was an unsophisticated country girl of 13, who did not know what failure meant, and who came to the city and made a fortune in open competition with shrewd financiers and daring speculators. Annie J. Scott, a penniless orphan, was sent to a farm in Lafayette county, Mo., when she was 8 years old, as nursemaid and “help.” The success of a neighbor’s child Incited her to study and save money, so that she might attend the Warrensburg Normal school. She milked cows, sold butter and saved SSO. Then she went to Warrensburg and worked her way in three years through the normal school, graduating in 1894. Her first ambition was to become a missionary, but she became ill and was cared for at the German Hospital in Kansas City. There she determined to be a doctor, and In 1897 en-