New York City
Emily Huntington, born in Lebanon, CT, began her long and useful career at the age of 31 in 1872. She was an educator and author who focused on the needs of kindergarten teachers and girls’ home economics courses. Miss Huntington became matron of the Wilson Industrial School for Girls in New York City, where she worked with poor, largely immigrant families living in the city’s East Side tenement district. The school was founded in 1853 to provide a moral, intellectual, and domestic training for poor and vagrant children. Concerned with her charges’ inability to perform even domestic tasks, she sought to make her lessons instructive and enjoyable. She taught at the school for twenty years.
Her 1878 book “The Kitchen Garden; or, Object Lessons in Household Work” was included in lesson plans and lists of materials needed to teach a variety of household chores. Also included in her curriculum were songs for pupils to sing while performing these chores; this method of teaching domestic skills was imitated in other books and in classes at industrial schools.
Reprints of her book are still sold on Amazon.com at: Click Here
Miss Huntington left the Wilson Industrial School for Girls, in 1892 to become the superintendent of the New York Cooking School. She demonstrated her techniques at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Along with Ellen Swallow Richards, she was one of the attendees invited to the first Lake Placid Conference on home economics in 1899, and she led a session titled “The Kitchen-Garden and the Kindergarten.”
Miss Huntington died of arteriosclerosis on December 5, 1909, in Windham, Connecticut, after a lingering illness, and is buried in Yantic Cemetery.
Her parents were Dan (1804-1879) & Emily Wilson Huntington (1817-1871). She was survived by her brother, the Reverend George W. Huntington of London, and a niece, Mrs. Theodore Dimon of Utica, N.Y.
Based upon a preliminary search of her genealogy, she was not directly related to the Huntington family based in Norwich. The majority of her family members were buried in Lebanon, CT.
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