Representative women of New England/Kate Douglas Wiggin
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN (Mrs. George C. Riggs) is an author whom New Englanders like to claim as one of their own number, her inherited tastes and aptitudes being derived from generations of New p]nghuKl ancestry. Of the different localities that have known her as a resident she herself has thus s|joken: "Pennsylvania was the State of my birth, Maine was where my childhood and happy girlhood were passed, California is the scene of all the practical work I have done among poor children, while my married life the past nine years has been divided between New York and Great Britain." (She became the wife of George C. Riggs in 1895.)
Born in Philadelphia, daughter of Robert Noah and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, she is a grand-daughter of Noah, Jr., and Hannah (Wheaton) Smith and of Jones and Lydia (Knight) Dyer, all of Maine in their day, and great-grand-daughter of Noah Smith, Sr., of the South Parish of Reading (now Wakefield), Mass., born in 1775, who was a Captain of cavalry in the State militia. Captain Noah Smith is spoken of by the historian of Reading as a "man of great vivacity, intelligence, and public spirit, remarkable for an inexhaustible fund of witty anecdote and lively story, with large develo])ment of language and mirtlifuliK'.ss. His father was Captain David Smith.
Noah Smith, Jr., son of Captain Noah and his wife Mary, daughter of Paul Sweetser, of Reading, was born in 1800. He settled in Maine, where he became prominent in public life, serving for a number of years as Speaker of the House in the State Legislature and later as clerk in Congress.
Kate Douglas Smith, the subject of our sketch, was educated first at her home in Hollis, a small Maine village, then at Gorham Seminary near by, and later at Abbot Academy, Andover, Mass.
In 1873 the family removed to Santa Barbara, Cal., and in 1876, while living in (California, the future chronicler of childhood studied kindergarten methods under Emma Marwedel, and, after teaching in the Santa Barbara College for a year, she organized in San Francisco the first free kindergarten west of the Rocky Mountains. This school, the Silver Street Kindergarten, was in a quarter of the city where squalor and poverty reigned supreme, and it was to the very poor that she began giving liberally her time, energy, and enthusiasm. She soon saw the need of trained assistants, and in 1880 she organized the Cali- fornia Kindergarten Training School.
After her marriage in the same year to Samuel B. Wiggin, of Sail Francisco, the training school was conducted by her sister, Miss Nora Archi- bald Smith, who had been associated with her in the Silver Street Kindergarten. In 1888 Mrs. Wiggin removed with her husband to New York, where he died in 1889.
Mrs. Wiggin, while living as a widow in New York, thnnv herself with great energy into the kindergarten movement in that city, and it was in this interest that she was drawn into the semi-public reading of her own stories.
Her first published story, "Half-a-dozen Housekeepers," written in California when she was eighteen, appeared in St. Nicholas in November and December, 1878. "The Story of Patsy," written for the benefit of the kindergarten, is said to have reached a sale of three thousand copies without the aid of a publisher. The "Birds' Christmas Carol," whose sale was equally large, has been translated into Japanese, French, German, Danish, and Swedish, and has been put in raised type for the blind. Among her other books may be mentioned "Polly Oliver's Problem," "A Summer in a Canon," three volumes relating to kindergarten work (of which she was joint author with her sister, Nora A. Smith),' "The Milage Watch-tower," "Timothy's Quest," "A Cathedral Courtship," the three Penelope books, " Diary of a Goose-girl," and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." Pleasant River, in "Timothy's Quest," is said to have been drawn from the Hollis locality, the summer home of Mrs. Riggs.
British opinion of "Rebecca" is indicated in the following press notices: "Child or girl, Rebecca is just delightful. . . . The opening chapter, relating the conversation between Mr. Cobb, the driver of the stage-coach, and Rebecca, as he conveys her to Aunt Mirandy's, is, in its subtle humor and simple pathos, equal to any parallel passage in Dickens. Rebecca is thoroughly refreshing" (Punch).
"This is a story that will be read and reread. . . . Tears and laughter will greet her, but smiles and laughter will predominate. We have no doubt of the success of 'Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm'" {Glasgow Herald).
"Rebecca is as charming and as new, as humorous and as natural, as ever was anything in a story or out of it . . . touches literature of a very high order" {Country Life).
Mrs. Riggs goes abroad yearly, Init usually spends the summer wholly or in part at Hollis, where she is a welcome guest, for the old and young love her. She takes up work in the old Orthodox church on Tory Hill, playing the organ, singing when needed, helping in the Sunday-school library. She opens her house, "Quilleote," for sociables and sewing-circles, and every autumn, just before leaving for her New York home, she gives a reading from her own books for the benefit of the old church, the only public reading she gives nowadays.
During her absence in Scotland in .June, 1904, Bowdoin College conferred on Mrs. Riggs the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature.