Kate Douglas Wiggin: Rebecca's Maine

The summer home called Quillcote, here in Hollis, Maine, belonged to one of the most widely read American authors of the early twentieth century. Kate Douglas Wiggin was born in Philadelphia in eighteen fifty-six, grew up partly in Portland, Maine, and became famous first as an educator, opening the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in eighteen seventy-eight. But it was her fiction that carried her name across generations: her nineteen oh-three novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was an immediate bestseller, one of the defining children's books of the era.

Wiggin spent summers at Quillcote for much of her later life, and in nineteen eleven she founded the Salmon Falls Library in Hollis, just around the corner from her house. Quillcote is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wiggin died in nineteen twenty-three.