Kate Douglas Wiggin
Kate Douglas Wiggin (September 28, 1856 to August 24, 1923) was a US educator and writer of children's stories, the most famous being the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She pioneered the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878, and with her sister in the 1880s, established a kindergarten teachers training school. Wiggin spent her adult life providing welfare to children when they were often thought of as a source of cheap labor. She studied kindergarten methods in San Francisco and began to teach with her sister Nora. The pair established over 60 kindergartens for the poor in San Francisco and Oakland, California. After moving from California to New York, where there were no kindergartens to work at, she devoted herself to literature. Her The Story of Patsy and The Bird's Christmas Carol were immediately accepted for publication by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. AS well as her talent for story-telling, she was a musician, a good singer, an excellent elocutionist, and composer of settings for her poems. Half a Dozen Housekeepers, was a serial that she sent to St. Nicholas. When her husband died in 1889, she went back to California and resumed her kindergarten work as the principal of a Kindergarten Normal School. Other works by Wiggin included A Summer in a Canon, Cathedral Courtship, Timothy's Quest, Kindergarten Chimes, Polly Oliver's Problem, The Story Hour, and Children's Rights.
