Ada and Minna Everleigh

Ada (top) and Minna Everleigh, in portraits commissioned in Omaha, Nebraska in 1895.

Ada and Minna Everleigh, born Ada and Minna Simms, were two sisters who operated the Everleigh Club, a high-priced brothel in the Levee District of Chicago during the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Ada, the eldest, was born in Greene County, Virginia on February 15, 1864,^[1]and died in Charlottesville, Virginia on January 5, 1960.^[2] Minna was born in Greene County on July 13, 1866^[1] and died in New York, New York on September 16, 1948.

The sisters claimed an alternative biography, which has long been accepted as factual. Karen Abbott has debunked their story.^[3]

According to their story, Minna and Ada Simms were born outside of Louisville, Kentucky in 1876 to a wealthy lawyer who had fled to Kentucky from Virginia when Benedict Arnold invaded Virginia in 1781. The two sisters had been to finishing school and had proper social debuts. When Minna was seventeen, she says, she married a man whose last name was Lester who turned out to be abusive. Ada claimed to have been married to Lester's brother, who also turned out to be abusive. After both marriages had failed, they became actresses. Claiming their father died in the early 1890s, they said they came into a legacy of $35,000.

According to Abbott, whose research included an interview with the sisters' great niece, Minna and Ada were born in Greene County, Virginia to Montgomery Simms, his second and third daughters. Their mother died when they were young, as did an older and younger sister. There were seven children total, although only five survived to adulthood. Although the family was wealthy at the time of their birth, they lost much of their wealth during the Civil War and the family lost their plantation when they couldn't pay their taxes.^[4] There is no proof that either sister was ever married.

Stranded by a theater company in Omaha, Nebraska, the sisters changed their last name to "Everleigh," adapted from their grandmother's correspondence ("Everly Yours," she would sign) and opened their first brothel in Omaha in 1895. When the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition was held in Omaha in 1898 they opened a second brothel in the vicinity of the event in Kountze Park and quickly doubled their investment. They then decided to close their brothels and seek out a more affluent city.^[5]

By 1900 they settled in Chicago and opened a high class brothel called the Everleigh Club which did good business until closed down in 1911. At the time it was closed by the city authorities Ada was 47 and Minna 45: they then retired and moved to New York.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Abbott 2007, p. 4.
2. ^ Abbott 2007, p. 296.
3. ^ Abbott 2007, pp. 23-46.
4. ^ Wendt & Kogan 1974, pp. 320-322.
5. ^ Inghamn, J. (1983), Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Greenwood Press, p. 354 .

References

• Abbott, Karen (2007), Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul, Random House, ISBN 9781400065301 .
• Asbury, Herbert (1940). Gem of the Prairie. Knopf. 
• Wendt, Lloyd; Kogan, Herman (1974). Bosses in Lusty Chicago (a.k.a. Lords of the Levee). Indiana University Press. pp. 320–322. ISBN 0253201098. 
• Hibbeler, Ray (1960), Upstairs at the Everleigh Club, Volitant Books .
• Masters, Edgar Lee (April 1944), "The Everleigh Club", Town & Country .
• Wallace, Irving (1965), The Sunday Gentleman, Simon & Schuster .
• Wallace, Irving (1988), The Golden Room .
• Washburn, Charles (1936), Come Into My Parlor: A Biography of the Aristocratic Everleigh Sisters of Chicago, Knickerbocker Publishing .