Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 September 1887 — PHIL ARMOUR’S MISSION. [ARTICLE]

PHIL ARMOUR’S MISSION.

The Kind of a Millionaire’s Hobby that Plain People Like to See. Chicago Herald. Phii Armour, notwithstanding the weather was not the sort for his rheumatism, was around at his mission yesterday. He is there every Sunday. During the week it {$ run from Jus LaSalle street office, just as his packinghouses are. There are now about 1,100 children at the mission on Sundays. Theffe are 5,000 men at the different packing-houses. Armotir will be satisfied when there are as many little folks up at the Thirty-third street establishment on Sundays as there are men at his “houses” on week days. There are about as many departments at the one establishment as at the other. At the mission there is a kindergarten, the most perfect in some respects in the world. It is an important part o£ Froebel’s system that there shall be for the children, on the floor in the classroom, a good-sized circle, cut in various wayß into segments, upon which they can form and march. The circle on the floor in the kindergarten room up at Armour’s is the largest anywhere. It’s only a deep-black line of paint, making a circumference with a fifty-foot diameter, but it cost high. The plans of the mission were dra'wn so that when it came to making that big circle on the floor of the kindergarten a pillar stood right in the way. The teacher was in despair. A kindergarten without a perfect circle on the floor would be a failure. When the trouble was explained to Phil Armour he declared at once that he was with the teacher. If he could not have a kindergarten of the right sort he did not want any building. So the pillars had to come out and the foundations had to. be changed and the building alittle altered. It, took two months’ additional time and probably $20,000 extra expense, but that kindergarten -up at the mission has got the finest and biggest circle in creation. There are ninety little ones in the class, and each one of the ninety has a history of his or her own. Most of them were picked out from ,the most distressing sort of su .’roundings, fixed up by the sewing society, which is another department of the mission, and entered in the kindergarten. Children whose parents can possibly afford to send them to a pay school can’t come into Phil Armour’s Thisjs about the only sine qua non about the Thirty-third street establishment.People who can afford to pay a doctor are turned away from the dispensary; people who possibly can buy their own medicines don’t get their prescriptions filled free. Children whose parents have got anything at all are not taken at the kindergarten. It’s just the other way at the Armour packing house, where nobody gets anything unless they have got the money in their clothes. The late J. O. Armour left SIOO,OOO to establish this mission. All of that went into the mipsion building proper. Phii Armour has given $400,000 more to keep the work going.