Harriet Frances Carpenter

Harriet (nickname, "Pearl")[2] Frances Carpenter was born at Lyons, Iowa, on June 6, 1875.[lower-alpha 1] Her parents were Abraham and Mary Carpenter. She was of an old colonial Pennsylvania family; and the eighth lineal granddaughter of Madam Feree, the French Huguenot colonizer of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania from whom Admiral Winfield Scott Schley claimed descent. Her ancestors were loyal patriots and Revolutionary heroes, dwelling for seven generations in the big, stone mansion "Carpenter Hall" on the lands deeded to them by William Penn. The place was sold when the grandfather moved west. Later Harriet's father owned large wheat ranges at Fargo, North Dakota and at Island Lake, North Dakota. Being a delicate child, she was taken there to romp over the prairies and to ride the horses brought, unbroken, from Montana. It was here that the love for nature, that colored her life, first developed.[1]

After careful tutoring, Carpenter went to Chicago to finish her education. She graduated from the Chicago Kindergarten College, toward the end of the 19th century, with the highest honors of her class.[1]

The same year as her graduation, Carpenter became Superintendent of the Cincinnati Free Kindergarten Training School and Supervisor of its thirty kindergartens. She was a charter member of the Cincinnati Woman's Club, and to members of its Educational Department, gave her first course of lectures on Children's Literature and on the interpretation of music drama for which her several trips to Beyreuth had fitted her.[1]

After a few years, she resigned to seek rest and to continue the study of interpretive art, coming to New York City for the purpose. But Newark, New Jersey was in need of an enthusiastic leader for the kindergartens then newly put into the public school system there, and in 1898,[2] she was persuaded to take charge of this work in the city normal school, later known as New Jersey State Normal School (now, Kean University). The general courses in storytelling that Carpenter conducted there led to the publication of her two volumes, entitled Mother Play In Story, and several children's dramas and other child literature used in modern school life of that era.[1]

Carpenter was opposed to the idea of taxation without representation, and on principle, an advocate of Equal Suffrage. In 1912, to help the cause, she sued the state for the right to vote as a property holder. Her insistment was that the right once exercised by the women of New Jersey had been taken away illegally. The Supreme Court of New Jersey did not agree with her.[1]

Carpenter lived in her country home on Long Hill Road, in the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey.[1]

Harriet Frances Carpenter died in Branchville, New Jersey, August 16, 1956, and was interred at Long Hill Cemetery.[2]