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Mary Reynolds Aldis (1872–1949)

Mary Reynolds Aldis (1872–1949)

Mary Reynolds Aldis was born in Chicago on July 8, 1872. After being educated at St. Mary’s School in Knoxville, Illinois, she married the Chicago developer Arthur T. Aldis in 1892. In 1911, she founded at her summer home the Aldis Playhouse of Lake Forest (known as a Little Theatre), which had full seasons through 1915. She authored the play Mrs. Pat and the Law, and Other Plays (1915) and the novel Drift (1918). After the First World War, she was president of the Visiting Nurse Association of Chicago. She was a friend of Mildred Barnes Bliss, with whom she corresponded since at least 1903. She died in 1949.


Babette Inglehart, "Mary Reynolds Aldis," in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 24–27.