Bacon, Albion Fellows (1865–1933)

American housing reformer. Born on April 8, 1865, in Evansville, Indiana; grew up in McCutchanville; died in Evansville, on December 10, 1933; daughter of Albion (a Methodist minister) and Mary (Erskine) Fellows; younger sister of Annie Fellows Johnston (1863–1931); married Hilary E. Bacon (a banker and merchant), in October 1888; children: four.

In October 1888, after graduating from high school in Evansville, Indiana, Albion Fellows married Hilary Bacon. It was a double ceremony. That same day, her sister Annie Fellows (Johnston) , who would go on to author "The Little Colonel" series, married William L. Johnston. A small, fragile woman, Albion Bacon's next few years were marked by periods of confinement because of a lengthy illness and the birth of four children.

By chance, she became aware of the riverfront slums of Evansville and became involved with the Evansville Civic Improvement Society. Over the years, Bacon organized the Men's Circle of Friendly Visitors, the Flower Mission for poor working girls, a Working Girls' Association, an Anti-Tuberculosis League, and the Monday Night Club which was composed of influential denizens with a charitable bent. Convinced that the chief cause of slums was substandard housing, Bacon struggled for years before she managed to have a tenement-house law included in the cities' building codes (1909) for Evanston and Indianapolis. In 1913, the Indiana Housing Association, which she had helped organize, pushed through a bill that pertained to the entire state. Bacon published an account of the campaign in her autobiographical Beauty for Ashes (1914). She was also responsible for another 1917 law involving the condemnation of unsafe or unsanitary buildings.