Kate Douglas Wiggin

Early career

In 1873, hoping to ease Albion Bradbury's lung disease, Wiggin's family moved to Santa Barbara, California, where her stepfather died three years later. A kindergarten training class was opening in Los Angeles under Emma Marwedel (1818–1893), and Wiggin enrolled. After graduation, in 1878, she headed the first free kindergarten in California, on Silver Street in the slums of San Francisco. The children were "street Arabs of the wildest type", but she had a loving personality and dramatic flair. By 1880 she was forming a teacher-training school in conjunction with the Silver Street kindergarten.

In 1881, she married (Samuel) Bradley Wiggin, a San Francisco lawyer. According to the customs of the time, she was required to resign her teaching job. Still devoted to her school, she began to raise money for it through writing, first The Story of Patsy (1883), then The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887). Both privately printed books were issued commercially by Houghton Mifflin in 1889, with enormous success.

Wiggin had no children. She moved to New York City in 1888. When her husband died suddenly in 1889, she relocated to Maine. For the rest of her life she grieved; but she also traveled as frequently as she could, dividing her time between writing, visits to Europe, and giving public reading for the benefit of various children's charities. She traveled abroad and back from Liverpool in the United Kingdom at least three times. Records from the Ellis Island logs show that she arrived back in New York City from Liverpool in October 1892, July 1893, and July 1894. On the logs for the 1892 trip, Wiggin describes her occupation as "wife", despite her former husband having died three years prior. In 1893 and 1894, she describes herself as an "authoress".

On her way to England in 1894, Wiggin met George Christopher Riggs, an importer of dry goods, specifically linen. The pair are said to have hit it off and to have agreed to marry even before the ship docked in England. In the Ellis Island logs from Wiggin's 1894 trip back to New York from Liverpool, the two signed their names next to each other, indicating their closeness. They married in New York City on March 30, 1895, at All Souls Church.

Riggs soon became one of Wiggin's biggest advocates as she became more successful. She continued to write under the name of Wiggin after the marriage. Her literary output included popular books for adults. With her sister, she published scholarly work on the educational principles of Friedrich Fröbel: Froebel's Gifts (1895), Froebel's Occupations (1896), and Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1896). In 1903 she wrote the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which became an immediate best-seller, as did Rose o' the River in 1905. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Mother Carey's Chickens (1911) were adapted to the stage. Houghton Mifflin collected Wiggin's writings in 10 volumes in 1917.

Wiggin was also a songwriter and composer. For "Kindergarten Chimes" (1885) and other collections for children, she wrote some of the lyrics, music, and arrangements. For "Nine Love Songs and a Carol", (1896), she composed all of the music.

For a time, Wiggin lived at Quillcote, her summer home in Hollis, Maine (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places). Quillcote is around the corner from the town library, the Salmon Falls Library, which she founded in 1911. She also founded a Dorcas Society in Hollis and the adjacent town of Buxton, Maine in 1897. The Tory Hill Meeting House in Buxton inspired her book (and later play) The Old Peabody Pew (1907).

Later life and death

Wiggin was an active and popular hostess in New York and in the community of Upper Largo, Scotland, where she had a summer home and where she organized plays for many years, as detailed in her autobiography My Garden of Memory.

Wiggin testified before a Congressional committee on women’s suffrage as an anti-suffragist. She stated that if women were as strong as they ought to be, they should be regularly consulted, to advise, collaborate, and contribute alongside men wherever their unique strengths were valuable. In her view, if women fully embraced and exercised these roles, they would not require the right to vote. Speaking to a group of anti-suffragists in Washington in April 1912, she added that she preferred women to be “strong enough to remain slightly in the background,” arguing that “the limelight never makes anything grow.” According to The Western Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wiggin believed that it was “more difficult to be an inspiring woman than to be a good citizen or an honest voter.”

In 1921, she and her sister edited an edition of Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs, an 1810 novel of William Wallace, for the Scribner's Illustrated Classics series, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. During the spring of 1923, Wiggin traveled to England as a New York delegate to the Dickens Fellowship. There she became ill and died, at age 66, of bronchial pneumonia. At her request, her ashes were brought home to Maine and scattered over the Saco River.

Wiggin's autobiography was published after her death. In sorting through material for it, she put many items in a box she and her sister labelled "posthumous", and from these materials her sister later published her own reminiscences of Wiggin, titled Kate Douglas Wiggin as Her Sister Knew Her.

Legacy

In the 1980s and 1990s, Wiggin's first husband's distant cousin Eric E. Wiggin published updated versions of some of the books in her Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm series. He later published his own addition to the series, entitled Rebecca Returns to Sunnybrook. Eric E. Wiggin extended her series after years of writing Christian literature, newspaper articles, and other children's books. His books sold best among his target audience of homeschoolers; with their help, his updated novels and his new addition to the series have sold more than 50,000 copies.

Many of Wiggin's novels were made into movies. Among them is the 1938 film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938 film), starring Shirley Temple.