In 1870, Jennie Collins (1828-1887) founded Boffin’s Bower here to provide working women with a place to read and socialize, as well as food, clothing, job placement, and other aid. Collins, who left school at 14 to work in a cotton mill, named the charity after Boffin’s Bower in the Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend. She was also a labor and women’s rights activist, and one of the first working-class women in America to publish a volume of her own writings: Nature’s Aristocracy (1871).
