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Title
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P31 Nelly Don Collection Finding Aid
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Description
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The Nelly Don Collection contains 35 black and white photographic prints donated to the Missouri Valley Special Collections in August 2001. The donor's aunt had been an employee of the Donnelly Garment Company and had collected these photographs. Few of the individuals in the photographs are identified, and many images are not dated. The photographs largely consist of Donnelly Garment Company employee group portraits on holiday and otherwise festive occasions.Nell Donnelly Reed was born Ellen Quinlan in Parsons, Kansas, 1889, and moved to Kansas City in 1906. She began designing and sewing her own housedresses, several of which she offered for sale to the George B. Peck Dry Goods Company in 1916. By 1931 she owned the Donnelly Garment Company, which manufactured the widely known "Nelly Don" line of women's apparel. Reed retired in 1956, and the organization's name was changed to Nelly Don, Inc. The company evolved throughout the 1960s and 70s, although the changing economic climate of the nation eventually brought its demise. The selling of fabrics was a sustaining innovation of the 1970s, but Nelly Don, Inc., filed for Chapter 10 bankruptcy in 1978.
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Date
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1920~/1950~
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Object Type
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Finding Aid
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Title
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Top 10 Women Who Changed Missouri
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Description
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Short biographical vignettes of ten women who influenced not only Missouri but the country, some the world. Women included are: Annie Turnbo Malone (1869-1957), one of first Black female millionaires; Susan Blow (1843-1916), creator of kindergartens; Gergy Cori (1896-1957), first woman to win a nobel prize in medicine; Helen Stephens (1918-1994), an Olympic gold medal winner; Annie White Baxter (1864-1944), first woman in the U.S. to ever be elected to the office of county clerk and 30 years before women received the right to vote; Jane Froman (1907-1980), overcame many obstacles to become one of the most beloved entertainers of her time; Edna Gellhorn (1878-1970), activist and civic leader; Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), author and literary legend; Nell Donnelly Reed (1889-1991), creator of stylish fashions for women; and Louise Stanley (1883-1954), mother of home economics.
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Date
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2012-02
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Object Type
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Magazine Article
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Title
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Dictionary of Missouri Biography
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Description
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Biography of Nell Donnelly Reed (1889-1991), a pioneer woman clothing designer and entrepreneur, starting the Donnelly Garment Company in the 1910s and leading it to "one of the largest in the nation" for garment labels by the 1950s, remarried in the 1930s to James A. Reed.
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Date
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1999
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Object Type
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Book
