Gertie Divan

Gertie Divan Day celebrates the intrepid spirit of Gertie Divan, who was born into a large, hardscrabble family in a rural section of east-central Ohio in 1885.

At the turn of the century, when working as an indentured servant, a man in that household tried to assault her. She ran far away to Ada, Ohio and managed to enroll in Ohio Northern University for a semester or two. Some years later she attended Dennison University in Granville, Ohio.

She lived through 2 world wars, a pandemic and the Great Depression. Undaunted, she proceeded to marry, raise a family of 4 in a safe and loving home, and became the first in her family to go to college.  

Gertie is remembered as a woman working all the time in her huge garden, plowing with a mule, raising chickens, running a grocery store, butchering cows and pigs, and able to add up someone’s grocery tab quickly in her head. She died in 1971, just a week shy of her 86^th birthday.

The Gertie Divan Fund at Ivy Tech’s Bloomington campus provides unrestricted financial support for students so they, like Gertie, can persist through life's challenges to reach their goals.