 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Estelle Morehouse's Scrapbook | ||||||||||
 My
great-grandmother, Estelle Morehouse Buehman, was born in Portland, Michigan
in 1846. At 15 she earned a certificate entitling her to teach first grade
anywhere in the state. For the next 19 years she taught school, often "boardin'
roun'" in the house of her pupils, and clerk in the state auditor general's
office. She became interested in the principles of Frederic Froebel and
in 1880 she graduated from the Kindergarten Normal School in Columbus, Ohio.
She then headed west to the Arizona Territory where she opened the first
kindergartens--one in Globe (1880) and then another in Tucson (1881).
Friedrich Froebel not only gave us the word kindergarten, but he introduced one of the most comprehensive and effective systems of teaching art, design, mathematics, and natural history. This system started when the child was still in the crib with dangling balls, cylinders, and cubes. As the child progressed there was nature study, singing, dancing, storytelling, and playing with the so-called Froebel gifts--a series of twenty educational toys including building blocks, parquetry tiles, origami sheets, modeling clay, sewing kits and other design projects. The photos below are of Estelle Morehouse's scrapbook for Gifts 11 (Pricking), 12 (Sewing), 14 (Weaving), and 18 (Folding). There are pages and pages of her systematic approach to these skills. I'm always surprised how contemporary the paper weaving designs look, especially since they were done about 1880. It's no wonder that this system influenced a generation of artists and architects such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. Soon after arriving in Tucson, Estelle married the local photographer, Henry Buehman. She helped start the Congregational Church, worked to get a YMCA established, maintained the "Recreation and Reading Rooms" until the Carnegie Library was finished, and at one time was president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She was an active writer and produced papers on Japan, The Philippines, the American Women of the Nineteenth Century, and The Elizabethan Thought in England and America. In 1911 her local history, "Old Tucson" was published. Until Henry's death in 1912 she worked beside him in his photography studio. She had two children, Willis and Albert, who was my grandfather.
For more information about Estelle Morehouse: click here |
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
