Every now and then, a few people pay their respects to Frances Willard, dropping by the Evanston house she lived in for 33 years to leave a beer bottle on the porch or to take off with one of the signs planted in the front yard. Such drunken debauchery comes with the territory when the epicenter of the turn-of-the-century Temperance Movement is located less than a block from the southern tip of Northwestern’s Evanston Campus.

“We don’t mind. We can handle it,” said Lori Osborne, the tours and programs chairwoman of the Frances Willard Historical Association, the non-profit group that oversees the maintenance and preservation of the Frances Willard House, 1730 Chicago Ave.

“We’re well aware of the general hilarity that ensues when people talk about Frances Willard,” she said.

Times have changed in Evanston since Willard first focused on temperance, with liquor stores and bars now scattered throughout the city, which was dry until 1972. Business is not hampered by the city’s alcohol-free past, said Rohit Sahajpil, general manager at Tommy Nevin’s Pub and Restaurant, 1450 Sherman Ave.

“The city’s really fair,” Sahajpil said. “We want to make our customers happy, and we want to make the city happy. It’s a balancing act, but we think we do it pretty well.”

Still, the city’s long dry spell probably had its roots in Willard’s work here in the late 1800s, said Communication sophomore Henry Webster, who grew up in south Evanston.

“I think there’s something to it, because the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded here,” he said. “I (can’t say) whether it was more of a historical influence or a political influence.”

But any conversation about Willard that focuses only on her role in laying the foundation for Prohibition misses the larger point of her life, Osborne said. The story of a woman whose interests ranged from women’s suffrage to bicycles is contained within her former home, a National Historic Landmark that was built by her father in 1865 and served for more than 20 years as the national headquarters of the WCTU before being turned into a museum.

“(I) walk into the Willard House, and I always feel like she just left the room,” said Leslie Goddard, the manager of programs and education at the Evanston Historical Society.

“She is arguably one of the most famous people ever to come from Evanston,” Goddard said. “In the 1880s and 1890s, people knew Evanston because they knew Frances Willard.”

Willard, born in 1839 in Churchville, N.Y., was national president of the WCTU from 1879 until her death in 1898. She outfitted the house with the newest technology, Osborne said, replacing inefficient wood-burning fireplaces with a coal-fueled central heating system and installing electric lights that still work today. The house had one of Evanston’s first telephone numbers — 14.

“I imagine she would love the Web,” Osborne said.

Willard’s work with the WCTU, now headquartered behind the house in a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, tends to overshadow the details of her life that make her such an intriguing historical figure, said University Archivist Patrick Quinn.

“A lot of people have a mis-impression of Frances Willard,” he said. “They confuse her with a nut … Frances wasn’t anything like that at all.”

Even Willard’s exercise habits changed the role of American women. She was one of the first women to ride a bike, an experience she shared in her book, “How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle.” A copy of the book is displayed on a table inside her house.

Restoration work still reveals surprises from decades past. Renovations of a second-floor room were stalled when historical association staff discovered a section of the room’s original wall covering beneath the current wallpaper.

Willard was a major figure in the development of NU, where she served as a professor of aesthetics and the first dean of the Woman’s College in 1873, said Janet Olson, assistant university archivist and a historical society board member.

Sociology Prof. Gary Alan Fine has taken his freshman seminar classes to the Willard House. Fine said the university should promote its ties to Frances Willard by easing the financial burden facing the historical society.

“The university, in my opinion, should be providing financial assistance, either directly or indirectly, to keep this house in the shape it ought to be in,” Fine said. “It’s hard to imagine any location in Chicago being more important to women’s suffrage than that house down the street.”

Reach Ryan Haggerty at [email protected].