[walk along Green and then take a left onto Lamartine Street]
Sophia Hayden was born in Santiago, Chile in 1868. When she was six years old, her father (a dentist) sent her to live with his parents here in Jamaica Plain. She attended the Boston Public Schools and then became the first woman to graduate with a four year Architecture degree from MIT in 1890. She was teaching mechanical drawing at the Eliot School in 1891 when she won a competition held to design the Women's Building at the Columbian Exposition -- the World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893. The male architects who were appointed to design buildings were paid $10,000 but Sophia only received a fee of $1000. With a very tight timeframe and many, many changes requested by the Board of Lady Managers who were overseeing the building (including an added third floor!) she managed to complete the project on time and within budget. But it drove her to a state of exhaustion (possibly a nervous breakdown) and she had to be hospitalized at a sanitarium.
She returned to Boston and married the artist William Blackstone Bennett. They settled in Winthrop. She died in 1953 having never completed another building project.