Final Paper
Carrie J. Cole
Kate Douglas Wiggin Research

Kate.When I write of her, think of her, it is always on a first name basis. Conducting research and creating a biography on someone with whom Ifeel like I have a personal relationship belies the traditions of the Gutenberg galaxy and scholarly entrenchment in which I have been instructed.Kate made her imprint on my life at an early age; friends and family who know of her and talk about her work with me refer to Kate in the same manner.At the same time, the fact that I am on a first-name basis with Kate points to how her persona–and her memory–has been constructed in the town we both claim as home.Even though Kate died in 1923, she is still a very present entity in the town of Hollis, Maine, and is still referred to simply as “Kate” with the assumption that everyone there knows who she is.Yet elsewhere, Kate has been all but forgotten.

When friends and colleagues outside of Maine ask me what I research, and I reply that I am exploring Kate Douglas Wiggin in a performance context, I am met with blank stares.The stares are not just because Wiggin has not in the past been analyzed in the context of theatre and performance studies: she has little to no name recognition beyond the community of Southern Maine in which she is lauded.When I explain that she is the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, many of the women’s stares fade to a kind of acknowledgment; however, I always fear that recognition stems more from that story’s association with Shirley Temple vehicle films more than with Kate.My male colleagues?Well, Kate’s work always appealed more to girls than boys; the likelihood that a man my age would recall any of Kate’s children’s stories is minimal. 

Yet in her time, Kate’s popularity was a phenomena that bordered on stardom.Her books were translated into several languages; wherever she went, she was greeted by throngs of young girls draped in banners bearing her initials, and “Kate Clubs” would recreate and re-enact her stories, even sending her their dramatic adaptations for her approval.^[1]Yet today, her novels and stories have been all but forgotten in the wake of the popularity of children’s fantasy novels like the Harry Potter series.Her non-fiction work on education reform, also written to support her work in the Free Kindergarten movement and her own Silver Street Kindergarten in San Francisco, the first such school west of the Rockies, barely rates a footnote in education history in America.Kate’s dramatic contribution, always minimized by the traditional mainstream accounts of American theatre history at the beginning of the twentieth century, has almost disappeared.Yet Kate was author of all these things, in all these genres.Yet, for the most part, she is only remembered as such in the town of Hollis, Maine, where the inhabitants continue to celebrate not only her work, but her life in the context of that community.^[2]

Kate Douglas (Smith) Wiggin (Riggs) (1856-1923) was an extremely popular children's author and educational advocate at the turn of the twentieth century. While Kate was born in Philadelphia, she and her family moved to Hollis, Maine when she was very young. In her autobiography, My Garden of Memory, she counts the move as her earliest childhood memory, and even after her success as an educator and author, she continued to return to Maine to spend her summers writing. She spent her own childhood in the small town of Hollis, Maine.Once she established herself as an author, she and her sister, Nora Archibald Smith, returned to Hollis on a regular basis, eventually purchasing the house they first lodged in upon their return to the area, which was just down the road from the cottage in which they lived as children.They named their home Quillcote, and while the house and land passed out of the family after Smith’s death, and is now privately owned by Bill and Carla Turner, the community still publicly recognizes it as a physical representation of the author they claim as their own.This house, along with the adjacent Salmon Falls Library and Tea Room that Wiggin built for the community, stand as monuments to Wiggin’s continued presence and importance in this community.The people now associated with these buildings also offer a sense of continuity in how Wiggin is characterized and create a biographic link between the present community (particularly the community of women), Wiggin, and the past community of which she was a part.

There are many things that fascinates me about Kate,particularly the continuing performance of her life and work in my home town.^[3] It may seem odd at first glance to be studying Kate under the guise of theatre and performance studies--after all, she was "just" an author and educator, who earns a paragraph or two at most in your average encyclopedia, and is most noted in these entries for starting the first free kindergarten West of the Rockies when she opened the Silver Street Kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878.

All of these biographical entries fall short of portraying the effulgent, charismatic and amazingly popular woman whose fan clubs spanned the world. If this project brings her stories back out from the attic, bravo!--but that is really not my intent. My intent in dusting off the cobwebs that now hang upon the memory of Kate and her works, is to reveal her in a new kind of light. Kate Douglas Wiggin, known as an educator and author, was also a consummate performer. By looking at her association with the theatre and by studying the way she used theatre and performance in her own life, I can better understand why my home town continues to perform not only her work, but her life, in a way that reveals as much about Kate as it does about village community.

The overarching objective of my work on and with Kate Douglas Wiggin is telescoped here to look specifically at Kate as a member of the community of Hollis and Salmon Falls Village and how her former home, Quillcote, continues to serve as a living and vibrant monument to her presence in and affect on this village community.Quillcote (“Dove-cote, the home of the dove; Quillcote, the home of the pen. Why not?”) is notable not only for the time it was in Kate’s possession, but what the story of her purchase of it tells about the community in which it is situated.^[4]Equally important is how the owners that purchased the house after it passed out of Kate’s family have acknowledged the history of the site and its place of importance in the community.This study is informed not only by Kate and her sister Nora’s own writing about Quillcote and the surrounding area, but by interviews with the current residents of Quillcote, Carla and Bill Turner, whose family has owned Quillcote since it passed from Kate’s estate. The words speak to their “official” capacity as caretakers of the buildings and the history, and their personal connection as community members to the importance of Wiggin and her work to them.The goal of these interviews was to begin to build an understanding of how the community constructs a biography of Wiggin, and how that biography is involved in constructing a reflection of their unified, communal identity.

Hollis itself has always had a small town feel, and rightly so: it is a town that features a single, flashing, stop light, two gas stations, and a general store.Recently, the town has faced its share of growing pains: Buxton Oil Company now has one of its main offices towards the center of town, and Poland Spring Water has built an expansive new water treatment plant in the vicinity.Yet, whenever I return, the older generations still recognize me not just as “Fred’s daughter,” since my father serves as the rural letter carrier for the Postal Service there, but as “Lucian’s granddaughter.”Lucian, my mother’s father, was the country veterinarian, and although he died in 1985, memory of him is strong.

One of the areas of Hollis that has changed the least is the Salmon Falls Village area.Located alongside the Saco River, the Village has a narrow, meandering road lined predominantly by large brick or white painted Federal style houses built at the end of the eighteenth century.There has been some new building in the area in the past twenty or thirty years, but for the most part, the large tracts of land associated with the houses of Salmon Falls Village have remained intact.Six hundred acres still comprise Quillcote property. Three houses have been built on it: Quillcote, a small ranch style house immediately adjacent that was built in the late 1960s, and another contemporary home built within the last decade on the far end of the property. Another home planned for when the current owners’ eldest son retires from the Air Force.

But at the time Kate and her family moved to the area in the 1860s, there were only a seven homes in Salmon Falls Village, and beyond that enclave, the nearest neighbor was three miles away.The move to the area is Kate’s first childhood memory as she outlines it in My Garden of Memory, and the Village would serve as both inspiration and solace throughout her life.^[5]She recounts numerous stories of childhood adventures along the Saco river. At ten, Kate was already writing–and already writing about the house that would one day become her beloved Quillcote.In the diary she kept at the time, and reprinted in part in My Garden of Memory, she recounts how she had spent the morning “over to the Carll’s to see them dig the cellar under the new ell,” noting in her autobiography that “the Carll house is now my own ‘Quillcote,’ and the child who saw the cellar dug little thought it was directly under the room which would one day by her study, where she would write Susanna [and Sue], [The Story of] Waitstill [Baxter], Mother Carey[‘s Chickens], The Old Peabody Pew, Rose o’ the River, New Chronicles of Rebecca, etc.”^[6]

The story of how Kate and her sister Nora acquired Quillcote from Mrs. Thomas Carll, whose family owned the house for much of the nineteenth century,is not only a fascinating story of the women’s creativity and patience, but an interesting insight into the type of personalities then inhabiting the region.The process of purchasing the house reveals as much about the community as it does about the writers who bought the place.Kate writes of her family’s earlier connections with the house that led her to be “possessed by the demons of covetousness” when she learned that the house was vacant: “The house had been originally the finest in the village, and though rather dilapidated had about it a kind of ancient splendor.It was full of associations for us, too, for, ... it was there that we had boarded for two summers before my mother’s second marriage, and it was quite near the cottage where my childhood was passed.”^[7]Kate then goes into the details of first renting the house from the heirs of Mrs. Carll: “It was owned by five or six heirs of Mrs. Carll, but managed by one of them in the town of Gray, fifty miles away...He reminded me that the premises were entirely run down, and that the inside of the house would need considerable expenditure in order to put it into livable condition.He therefore said we should have to make our own repairs...”^[8]

The sisters lived in the house for a few summers before they began the complicated process of buying the property from the five familial heirs to the Carll estate.Over the course of two years, Kate and Nora managed to convince the heirs, all living in separate states, not only to sell the property to them, but to agree to a price–evidently quite an arduous task.In addition, there was what Kate termed “a romantic and unique lien on the estate which might be difficult to adjust.Mrs. Thomas Carll, the owner, had made an unusual will...”^[9]Perhaps the best understanding of its uniqueness can be found in Kate’s own description of it:

A young girl of fifteen, Olive Bradish by name, came to live with the Carlls, and, after the fashion of the time, helped Mrs. Carll with the household duties, becoming part of the family, although never legally adopted....The years went on and, though Mrs. Carll and Olive has attained a good age, it was the mistress of the house who dies first....Mrs. Carll had made a most kindly and complicated will, aided, I should think, by a lawyer of extraordinary ingenuity.She had built an ell to the house during the later years of her life ....This ell she left to Olive, together with a sitting-room and two small bedrooms (one down and the other up stairs) in the “main part”; entrance and exit over the stairs at all times, share of the woodshed and pump and half an acre of garden spot.^[10]

When you visit the house, and Carla Turner, the current owner of Quillcote, points to the various parts of the house that were left to Olive Bradish, you can begin to understand what seems to be the enormous absurdity of the situation in which Kate found herself as she attempted to purchase the house.The rest of the Village community was convinced Olive would never sell; and for quite some time, Kate and Nora lived in the parts of the house they had already acquired, and Olive lived within the confines of her inheritance.They shared the space companionably, as their paths constantly crossed within the overlapped confines of their property.

It was this neighborly companionship that allowed Kate and Nora to eventually convince Olive to sell her share of the house, and move into the apartment they had designed for her out of the old servants’ quarters in the barn attached to the house.The linchpin in the decision-making process for Olive was that the women vowed to honor and respect “Olive’s Part” of the house, even making a banner to hang over the mantel in the room bearing that phrase. To this day, what became Kate’s study (and still serves in that capacity) is referred to as “Olive’s Part.”^[11]

Once the sisters owned Quillcote in its entirety, the undertook in earnest the renovations the had been doing piecemeal since first renting the place from the Carll heirs.By 1915, the renovations were complete, and the details of Kate and Nora’s painstaking work were detailed in Mary Northend’ Remodeled Farmhouses, published that year.While the story of Quillcote’s renovation encompasses only a chapter within this work, it is one of the few records that exist of the changes that Kate and Nora made to the building, including the addition of a bow-front porch on the south side of the house, and most notable, the renovations to the barn.

The barn, which is attached to the house behind the old servants’ quarters, was remodeled with the Village community in mind: Kate often opened the house to the public during the summer, and served as hostess for many social events, including those used as fundraisers for the chapter of the Dorcas Society that she helped found in the area in 1897. Northend vividly describes what the barn renovations entailed:

The most interesting idea in remodeling is presented by the old barn, which has been converted into a large music-room or hall, with a rustic platform at one end. Here a new floor has been laid, many windows inserted, and a few old-time settles placed, constructed of weathered wood toned by time to an almost silvery hue. Nothing else has been changed; the ancient rafters and walls remain as they were a century ago. The hall is lighted by many lanterns hanging from ceiling and harness pegs, also by curious Japanese lanterns painted especially for Mrs. Wiggin and bearing the name of the artist. The lanterns, hung overhead, greatly relieve the somber effect of the heavy beams. At the rear of the hall a broad door space makes a frame for a pretty picture,--a field of buttercups and daisies, a distant house, and two arching elms. A large closet, once a harness room, is fitted up with shelves and contains all the necessary china for a "spread" such as is given to the village folk several times a year, when dances are held in the old barn.^[12]

While Northend’s book is the only contemporary reference beyond Kate’s work that deals with Quillcote, her summer home is laced throughout Kate’s autobiography in a way no other house or home is.For a woman who, although embracing a public life, was unprepared for the physical and psychological demand of the constant public appearances, staged readings, and fundraisers, Quillcote provided a much need respite wherein she had complete control of her time and creative endeavors. At the height of her career, the summer home that she was eventually able to purchase provided the peaceful environment she needed to recover from the arduous speaking circuit and to write: “Quillcote began by being the most idyllic place for work ever known....Quillcote was then a restful, serene country home...”^[13]Soon, however, Kate’s own personality would infuse the home: “nowadays it is a beehive where not a single drone has a chance to live–a center of village improvement, a beacon light on the countryside on which somebody has to pile fuel every day.”^[14]When Kate was in the Village for the summer, the year-round inhabitants could always expect some lively evenings spent being entertained on the lawns of Quillcote.

Although Kate died in England in 1923, her sister Nora continued to maintain Quillcote until her own death in 1934.However, Nora had always relied upon Kate’s literary income to supplement her own; although Nora was also an author in her own right and collaborated with Kate on a number of works, she never received the kind of adulation and recognition Kate did.That, coupled with the onset of the Depression, forced Nora to slowly sell off some of the furnishings that she and Kate had so painstakingly procured for Quillcote.

After Nora passed away, the house stood vacant until 1938, when R. William and Frances Turner purchased the house.Turner, then the associate headmaster of the Emerson School for Boys in New Hampshire, bought the house, along with one of the other “original” homes in the Village, with the idea of turning it into a summer school for Emerson boys. The summer school never materialized, however, and when Turner asked his wife which of the houses she preferred to keep for their own summer home, she chose Quillcote.Turner died not long after; Fran summered in Quillcote until the mid-1990s, when poor health forced her to move into an assisted living facility.

Despite the house’s notable history as a literary residence, Fran always treated Quillcote with nonchalance.She was always willing to allow the few curious visitors to hunt down the site of Wiggin’s creativity to tour the house and grounds, and offered them what little history she had been given.But to Fran, the house was hers, not Kate’s; to that end, Fran undertook a major redecoration effort in the early 1970s, and outfitted the house in the height of fashion for the era.The “gold wall-to-wall carpet...all the neon orange and green wallpaper...all the day-glo yellow paint” remained in the house until Fran’s son, Bill, moved into the house when Fran was no longer able to care for it.^[15]

At that time, Bill and Carla, having just entered the second marriage for both of them, became the first year-round residents to the house since Mrs. Carll.As Carla describes it:

Oh yes, Bill and I were the first couple in the twentieth century to spend the winter here.And that was actually the first year we were married, and then we moved from next door [to the house that Bill and his first wife, Evie, built on Quillcote land] Bill, is it going to be five years in May that we moved in here?(Bill responds from the kitchen to the effect that he doesn’t remember because they moved over such a long period of time)....It’s just one big blur for him...we probably spent 3 months moving out fifty years worth of summer rubble...when we moved in, every drawer of this house, every drawer, EVERY drawer, ...had mouse droppings in it! [There was] all sorts of rubble and paraphernalia from the Emerson School, just years worth of summer house stuff...^[16]

Included in the “rubble” was an enormous amount of material leftover from when the elder Turners has originally purchased the house from Nora’s estate.And while Fran has always preferred to think of Quillcote as her summer home, Bill and Carla both felt a deep commitment to renovating and maintaining the house as a historical monument to Kate while they simultaneously treat it as their own.Almost immediately, they undertook renovations that attempted to “re-Quillcote” the house, while at the same time updating some of the electrical and plumbing systems:“Yes, we took the 1972 disco renovations out...all the gold wall-to-wall carpet is gone...all the neon orange and green wallpaper is gone...all the day-glo yellow paint is gone...I don’t know what Fran had going on in her head but hey it was the seventies...I think that she didn’t have the same attitude about the house as Bill and I...it was very definitely her summer house...and it was her house...”[17]

The renovation has continued in earnest since Bill retired last year.Recently, after having completed a kitchen renovation involving stripping off several layers of wallpaper, Carla began to paint the room in a soft green.However, “it just didn’t feel right,” so she returned to the store and changed the shade to a colonial blue.Bill, who had left to run errands when the kitchen was being painted green, returned to fine it blue.He was perplexed, but not by Carla’s change of heart.Disappearing into the storage space under the eaves of the house, he returned a few hours later with a box of color photographs of Quillcote from prior to the renovations of the seventies.Carla had never seen pictures of Quillcote as Kate decorated it in color; all of the published photos of the house in Kate’s era were black and white.However, amidst the pictures Bill had uncovered in storage, were color photos of the kitchen—painted in a cheery colonial blue.

Both Bill and Carla Turner feel a strong community responsibility to restore and maintain the house that Kate Douglas Wiggin once owned.Carla continues to give private tours to the few interested parties that write or stop by; the “good tour” takes two and a half hours, and includes numerous stories of Olive’s Part, the summer entertainments in the barn—even a ghost story about the “boy in the blue sailor-suit.”[18]It is important to them that they help maintain the village feeling of community of this small enclave of homes along the Saco River in Hollis, particularly with the influx of new commerce and residents to the town.In restoring Quillcote, they strive to create (and recreate) a communal culture, and among their plans to support that culture is a reconstruction of an entertainment Kate and Nora devised around the installation of the quill-shaped weathervane that served as a naming ceremony for the house .Their attempts to reinvigorate the Village community in the way that Kate did speaks to whatBruce McConachie has called grassroots theatre in its performance context.McConachie states: “Raymond Williams used the term ‘structure of feeling’ to designate the emotional bonding generated by values and practices shared by a specific group, class, or culture.The concept includes ideology, in the sense of an articulated structure of beliefs, but also ranges beyond it to encompass collective desires and concerns below the conscious level.”^[19]

McConachie, Bruce. “Approaching the ‘Structure of Feeling’ in Grassroots Theatre.” Theatre Topics 8, no. 1 (1998): 33-53.

Northend, Mary H. Remodeled Farmhouses. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915. 

Smith, Nora Archibald.Kate Douglas Wiggin: As Her Sister Knew Her.New York: Houghton and Mifflin, Co., 1925.

Turner, Carla.Interview by author, 25-26 March 2002, Quillcote, Hollis, Maine.Tape recording.

Wiggin, Kate Douglas.My Garden of Memory.New York: Houghton and Mifflin, Co., 1923.