The Illinois State Museum is excited to announce the opening of Unsung Heroes.  This exhibition  profiles Anna Heistad, Thomas R. Jones, and Minnie Vautrin, three ordinary Illinoisans who did extraordinary things with their lives. Our hope is that it inspires you, the viewer, to think about the unsung heroes in your own life and the ways in which you are a hero to others.
Anna Heistad was born in Norway in 1868 and immigrated with her family to Wisconsin in 1871. Anna was one of ten children, and money was tight in their household.  When she was 16, she left home for Chicago and found work as a seamstress in a garment factory.
Anna sewed dresses for more than a decade. Â And then, one night, she had a dream that changed her life. Â A deeply religious woman, she dreamt she met her creator and was filled with shame that she had nothing to show for her life other than the clothes she had made. Â Anna awoke determined to dedicate her life to the service of others.Â
She enrolled in nurses training at Augustana Hospital. When she graduated, she became a travelling nurse, going into Chicagoâs immigrant slum neighborhoods to provide free medical care to the people that lived there.
In 1911, she became the dispensary nurse at the Marcy Center settlement house. In 1918, she became Marcyâs director. Under her leadership, the Center continued to provide social services to the surrounding community, including medical care, child care, American citizenship classes, Bible studies, and youth programs.
After her retirement in 1939, Anna turned her attention to the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who were settling in Chicago. She did what she could to ease their transition to life in America by loaning them money, helping them find jobs,and personally checking in on them to see that they had found suitable housing among kind neighbors.Â
At the end of her career, Anna Heistad said âthereâs nothing extraordinary in my life. Â Just steady work.â Â But during the course of her steady work, she had an extraordinary impact on the lives of the people around her. Â She left a legacy of people whose lives were improved through medical care, classes, or services offered at the Marcy Center, as well as a generation of young social workers who learned from her. Â When a young businessman on Maxwell Street was asked if he knew Miss Heistad, he said, âIâll say I do, half the business men of this neighborhood were raised by Miss Heistad.â
Wilhelmina âMinnieâ Vautrin was an Illinois missionary who, in 1937-1938, as Acting President of Ginling College for Women in Nanking China, protected as many as 10,000 women and children during the Nanking Massacre. Â For her willingness to set aside her personal safety to protect the lives of the powerless, some in Nanking revered Minnie Vautrin as the âGoddess of Mercyâ or âLiving Goddess.â
Minnie Vautrin was born and raised in Secor, Illinois, northwest of Bloomington. She trained as a teacher in Champaign at the University of Illinois, where she became involved in missionary activities. In 1912, at age 26, Vautrin joined the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and set off for China. Upon her arrival, she was moved by the pervasive illiteracy among Chinese women and devoted her life to promote womenâs education and help the poor in her community.
At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese war in July 1937, Vautrin defied the American embassyâs order to evacuate the city. In December, the capital city of Nanking fell to Japanese forces, and soldiers marauded through the streets looting, raping tens of thousands, and killing an estimated 300,000 civilians.
With only the protection of American flags and proclamations from the U.S. Embassy, Vautrin made Ginling College a sanctuary for women and children. Risking her life, Vautrin confronted armed soldiers who stormed the campus, and refused to let troops ransack the school or seize the refugees.
After the siege ended in March 1938, Vautrin devoted herself to caring for the refugees, by helping the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers, teaching destitute widows the skills required to make a meager living, and using what limited resources she had to provide the best education possible to the children of Nanking.
Exhausted and suffering psychological trauma from the events, Vautrin returned to the United States in 1940 for medical treatment. A year later, believing herself a failure, she ended her life.
Vautrin was one of twenty-some Westerners who remained in Nanking during the 1937-1938 siege. Although largely forgotten, a recent resurgence of scholarship, as well as the familyâs donation of her collection to the Illinois State Museum, will ensure that the story of Minnie Vautrin and her efforts at Ginling College live on.
Thomas R. Jones was a Navy corpsman who served 13 months in Vietnam attached to the 3rd Marine Reconnaissance Battalion, where he served as medic for his patrol unit and as an informal chaplain for his division. Although he physically survived the war, the person he had been before combat did not. Tom ultimately became a new person, one who learned to reconcile his war experiences with life in civilian society through service to other veterans.
Tom was born in Quincy, Illinois on November 17, 1944.   In 1965, he decided to join the Navy out of a desire âto learn more and to see more,â and for the educational opportunities that the Navy offered.  Upon enlistment, Tom took an aptitude test and was told he should either become a corpsman or a dental tech.  Tom, in his own words, thought âWhy would I want to be a dental tech and mess around with peopleâs mouths?  Iâll do a corps.â
As a corpsman, however, Tom ended up seeing much more than the inside of peopleâs mouths. Within two years of his enlistment, Tom would be sent into combat in Vietnam.  As a corpsmen, he dealt with every battlefield injury imaginable, trying to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be medevaced  to safety. Â
After Tom returned from Vietnam in 1968, he struggled emotionally with the readjustment to life in the United States.  He was haunted by memories of the killing and brutality. He had nightmares and flashbacks.  His friends and family told him heâd changed. The old Tom was gone, and the warrior he became had no place in a peaceful society.  He had to find a way to become a person  who could reconcile his combat experiences with his new civilian life.
Ultimately, Tom found peace through service to other veterans.  During his tour of duty, he had been not just Doc but Chaplain, someone his fellow soldiers sought out to talk them through their fears and troubles.  As a civilian, he found himself counseling soldiers through their battlefield experiences and readjustment to society.  He also became involved with several veteransâ organizations, including the Order of the Purple Heart, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, and Vietnam Veterans of America.  He served as on the Illinois delegation to the committee responsible for planning the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. and  was a driving force behind the construction of the Purple Heart Memorial in Oak Ridge Cemetery.  From 2013-2015, he served as project liaison to combat veterans working to recreate the Lincoln funeral hearse for the 2015 Funeral Reenactment.
In 2005, Tom published Lost Survivor, a fictionalized account of his combat experience and subsequent readjustment to civilian life.  It had taken him 20 years to write, but ultimately writing  proved a cathartic outlet for the emotional trauma he still carried from the war.  The book was later adapted into a theatrical play, A Long Way From Home,  which was produced in Springfield in 2010.  Both the book and play were praised by other veterans for their accurate portrayal of war and its toll on soldiers.
In 2015, Tom was diagnosed with bladder cancer, likely caused either by exposure to toxic water while at Camp LeJeune for marines basic training  or by exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.  He died October 7, 2017, at age 72, having proved that it is possible to survive the horrors of war without being possessed by them.
Unsung Heroes runs until June 10. Â