It would be impossible to imagine the local real estate industry without women today. In fact, the majority of real estate brokers and agents are women. But if you look back from the 1930s to the ’60s, it was a vastly different picture: Men accounted for nearly 100 percent of the sales and broker force.
Enter Isabella Sullivan. The first woman elected president of the local Board of Realtors, her career spanned only 16 years but cemented her legacy as a sales professional and home designer. In a mid-1950s column, Evansville Press Editor Ed Klinger called her “a formidable and respected opponent of the men who ran the business.”
Sullivan moved from Paducah, Kentucky, to Evansville in 1935 with her husband, Samuel, and two young sons in tow. She took a clerical job for Walter Stumpf, a real estate broker developing homes in the new East Side subdivisions of Lincoln Manor and Arcadian Acres. Stumpf was impressed by how Sullivan interacted with homebuyers and encouraged her to get her real estate license.
A few years later, she put her pencil to work and designed a nearly 2,000-square-foot Cape Cod-influenced home for her family at 2110 E. Chandler Ave. Shortly after moving in, she got an offer to sell. While that sale progressed, she built a 2,760-square-foot brick home next door and moved in. Eventually, she decided to sell that one and came up with her sales strategy: decorate simply, and before showing the home, put cookies in the oven to fill the house with a welcoming scent.
Homebuilder Wilbur Harrell was also developing Arcadian Acres and, impressed with Sullivan’s abilities, hired her in 1941 as his agent and designer. Her design philosophy was simple: make the home attractive to the wife. “After all,” Sullivan was quoted in a September 1953 Evansville Press article, “it’s the wife who spends the most time in them.” Sullivan brought the laundry room up from the cellar and out of the garage and into the home. Kitchens became more streamlined, and she helped popularize the mid-century use of a veneer made of Bedford, Indiana, stone, because she felt it exuded a warmth that simple brick did not.
When Harrell opened up the new Hebron Meadows subdivision in the late 1940s, most of the initial homes were designed by Sullivan, who worked primarily with post-war, newly affluent families. While Gale Bradford and Guthrie May built small starter homes for returning servicemen, Sullivan focused on households seeking a more exclusive location with wider lots and upgraded styles featuring low-slung ranch designs with wider eaves and large picture windows. She ultimately designed 380 homes. If you live in Arcadian Acres or Hebron Meadows in a home built before 1953, chances are you reside in a Sullivan design.
In the 1950s, her tenure on the local and state real estate boards marked the first leadership by a female member. Like other well-known women at that time, newspaper readers knew her simply as “Mrs. Sullivan.” Her June 1947 spine operation and her October 1947 divorce filing from husband Samuel both appeared in the Evansville Press.
Sullivan left the business in 1953 and spent her last working years owning and managing several motels along U.S. 41. She also helped her sons, James G. Brown and Kye Rorie, establish their own real estate businesses before passing away in August 1973.
