Kate Douglas Wiggin

Kate Douglas Wiggin was born in Philadelphia in 1856 and grew up in Maine and California. After training as a teacher, she became a kindergarten director in San Francisco. With her sister, Nora Archibald Smith, she helped establish the California Kindergarten Training School, preparing teachers for a movement that treated early childhood education as its own discipline. Wiggin also wrote about those methods for parents and teachers, bringing the work of the classroom into print.

She began publishing fiction while still working in education. Timothy’s Quest appeared in 1890, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm followed in 1903. The latter drew on her memories of rural Maine but was not a record of one child’s life. Wiggin’s books for young readers often place a lively, observant girl inside adult institutions—school, church, family—and let her test their rules through humor and conversation.

Wiggin married Samuel Bradley Wiggin in 1881; after his death she returned to Maine and later married George C. Riggs. She continued writing and died in 1923. The Maine State Library’s author record preserves the educator alongside the novelist: her literary career grew out of years spent building kindergartens and training teachers.