Explanation:
The settlement house movement started in England in 1884 when Cannon Samuel A Barnett, Vicar of St. Jude’s Parrish, founded Toynbee Hall in East London. The settlement idea, as formulated by Cannon Barnett, was to have university men “settle” into a working-class neighborhood where they would not only help relieve poverty and despair through their good works but also learn something about the real world from living day-to-day with the residents of the slums. According to an early Toynbee Hall report, it was “…an association of persons, with different opinions and different tastes; its unity is that of variety; its methods are spiritual rather than material; it aims at permeation rather than conversion; and its trust is in friends rather than in organization.”
Several Americans visited Toynbee Hall and were so influenced by the English experiment they decided to organize similar “settlements” in the United States. Among them:
Stanton A. Coit who founded the first American settlement in 1886 — Neighborhood Guild — on the Lower East Side of New York City (Note: the name was later changed to University Settlement)
Christina Isobel MacColl and her friend Sarah Carson founded Christodora Settlement House in the slums of New York City’s Lower East Side
Jane Addams and her college classmate, Ellen Gates Starr, founded Hull House on the West Side of Chicago in 1889
Vida D. Scudder and Jean Fine organized College Settlement in New York City
Robert A. Woods established Andover House in Boston (the name was later changed to South End House.
The settlement idea spread rapidly in the United States. By 1897 there were seventy-four settlements, over a hundred in 1900, and by 1910 there were more than four hundred in operation. Most settlements were located in large cities (40 percent in Boston, Chicago, and New York), but many small cities and rural communities boasted at least one settlement house. In the early years settlements and neighborhood houses were financed entirely by donations; and the residents usually paid for their own room and board.
