educator

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, (May 16, 1804 – January 3, 1894) is considered one of the most influential American women of her day. A pioneering educator she was early recognizing the importance of play in childhood development and learning. She started the first English-speaking kindergarten in the country, at 15 Pinckney Street, Beacon Hill, Boston.

The eldest of the three Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, Elizabeth early began assisting her mother who was an educator. With a passion for teaching she opened her own school in 1821.

to Maine

Benjamin Vaughan recognized Elizabeth Peabody’s importance in the thinking, intellectual world. In 1823 he brought Peabody to his home in Maine as governess and educator for his daughters and sons.

While in Maine she taught the children to two influential families and pursued her studies under a French tutor.

Peabody was influenced by the pillars of the Transcendentalist Movement. And in 1834 she assisted Bronson Alcott and fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller in opening the Temple School in Boston—with the goal of bringing a more organic approach to education and development, by encouraging curiosity, play, and embracing of nature.

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody is not directly in the mural but she had an influential voice in Hallowell.

artist, Chris Cart

literary circle

She opened a West Street Bookstore in Boston (1839-1850), where the local literary elite—Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson would gather to discuss ideas.

The bookstore also became gathering place for the leading women of the time leading to a series of meetings collectively called Conversations.

Peabody published the Transcendentalist literary magazine The Dial out of the bookstore, among many other publications, making her perhaps the first female book publisher in the country. She published Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Peabody was a great thinker and made her mark in the then male-dominated intellectual community.

Elizabeth’s sister the fine painter Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Elizabeth is purported to have “discovered” Nathaniel Hawthorne and helped him get his start.

Peabody became a writer and prominent intellectual in the Transcendental Movement. She read 10 languages and continued advocating for education her entire life.

She spent the 30 years of the rest of her life opening kindergartens across the nation and writing articles and books about childhood education.

Her gravestone reads:

A Teacher of three generations of Children, and the founder of Kindergarten in America. Every humane cause had her sympathy, and many her active aid.”