Maud McKnight Lindsay

This corner honors Maud McKnight Lindsay, a teacher who changed how Alabama saw its youngest children. Born in Tuscumbia in eighteen seventy-four, the daughter of a former governor, she trained in the new method of kindergarten and believed every child deserved one. In eighteen ninety-eight she founded the first free kindergarten in the state, and she planted it deliberately, right here in the working class cotton mill district of East Florence, among the families who could least afford schooling.

She was also a friend of Helen Keller, and a gifted writer. Beginning with Mother Stories in nineteen hundred, she published roughly eighteen children's books that stayed in print for generations. Maud Lindsay died in nineteen forty-one, and in nineteen ninety-five Alabama placed her in its Women's Hall of Fame.