NEW BOOK! SETTLEMENT HOUSE GIRL, My Memoir About Growing Up in Minneapolis at North East Neighborhood House

Caroline, Age 4, with her parents and brother Steve, on the steps of North East Neighborhood House

A book project long in the making is a memoir of my childhood years in Minneapolis, Settlement HouseGirl: Growing Up in the 1950s at North East Neighborhood House, Minneapolis, Minnesota. It focuses on the time our family lived at the settlement house that my father directed, as well as its influence on my life even after we moved to our own house in South Minneapolis. My original intention in writing the book was to explore the mid-20th century history of NENH and its role in the community at a time when settlement houses like it were in transition to today’s social service centers. But as I wrote down my memories and researched letters and documents, I realized that it was really a story about me and my family set in the context of a functioning settlement house and the surrounding neighborhood. The book ends in the summer of 1966, after I have graduated from Grinnell College, and the Scheaffer family heads to California. You can find the book on Amazon but you have to search for Caroline Scheaffer Arnold (which Google keeps trying to misspell!)

Settlement House Girl chronicles my childhood at North East Neighborhood House in Northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota, as I interacted and shared meals with other settlement house residents, participated in clubs, sports and community activities, and observed the roles of the staff and my social worker parents. It is an inside view of a working settlement house in the 1950s. The 38 chapters of the book range from my first days at the NENH nursery school, to after-school clubs and community holiday celebrations at the settlement, family and school life, and summers at Camp Bovey, the NENH camp in Wisconsin.

North East Neighborhood House, 1929 2nd Street NE. Our apartment was on the third floor.

North East Neighborhood House, founded in 1915, was part of the settlement house movement that began in England in 1884 and was brought to the US by people like Jane Addams at Hull House, in Chicago. Settlement houses, often called neighborhood houses, provided social services in immigrant and poor urban neighborhoods. NENH was supported by charitable donations and by the Community Chest (United Fund.)  Activities were led by volunteers who came from other parts of the city and by staff members who lived at the settlement house.

My father, Les Scheaffer, was the NENH director from 1948 to 1966. Few families lived in settlement houses as ours did and we were one of the last. By the 1950s, the tradition of social workers living in settlement houses was coming to an end. When my family moved out, it was the end of an era.

The stories in this book will spark memories in adults who grew up in the same time period, whether in Minneapolis or elsewhere. Librarians and teachers who know my books for children will find clues to my future life as a writer and illustrator. This book is about the role of settlement houses in urban neighborhoods at mid-century. It is a window onto a time when settlement houses were in transition from their roots in immigrant communities at the turn of the 20th century to becoming today’s modern social service agencies. What began as Northeast Neighborhood House more than 100 years ago, continues as East Side Neighborhood Services and it is still serving the needs of people in Northeast and East Minneapolis. My childhood at North East Neighborhood House provides a unique perspective on the role it has played in our social history.