For 20 years, Alice Ely Chapman has been working through her foundation to bring "Victorian values" -- perseverance, hard work -- to Rust Belt.

"Since coming to the city in 1996, Alice Ely Chapman has learned more about such values than she’d ever expected. She is a figure who seems to step out of the past, a Connecticut Yankee—from a first family of old New Haven, a descendant of Connecticut’s signer of the Declaration of Independence—come to southeastern Ohio, hard by the West Virginia line. As the founder, director, and principal funder of the Ely Chapman Educational Foundation, she has attempted over the last two decades to reintroduce Marietta’s struggling poor to the 'Victorian' values of her childhood—working in the line of someone like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who preached not just emancipation but self-discipline and 'persistence,' or even Cotton Mather, who lamented the ill effects of 'destructive Ignorance.'" -- Howard Husock, City Journal