Cornelia Warren

Cornelia Warren (March 21, 1857 – June 4, 1921) was an American farmer and an educational and social service philanthropist, widely known for her investment in social improvement projects. She was a trustee of Wellesley College, bought the location for Denison House and ran a model farm in Waltham, Massachusetts. She bequeathed her large estate to establish trust funds for maintaining hospitals, educational facilities, community projects and cultural venues in and around Boston, Massachusetts and Westbrook, Maine. She left Cedar Hill, the Warren family home and over 200 acres of land, to her brothers, if they wanted to live there, and if not, to the community. She assigned 2 trustees, one of whom was the famous landscape architect, Arthur Shurleff, to decide how her wishes for Cedar Hill would be carried out. Early life Cornelia Lyman Warren was born on March 21, 1857, at her family's estate, Cedar Hill in Waltham, Middlesex County, Massachusetts to Susan Cornelia (née Clarke) and Samuel Dennis Warren. Her father was a businessman and the founder the Cumberland Paper Mills in Westbrook, Maine, who amassed a fortune and established a trust fund to support his five children: Samuel II (1852–1910), who would become a businessman and lawyer; Henry (1854–1899), who was later a noted linguistic scholar; Ned (1860–1928), who grew up to be a collector of art and antiquities; and Fiske (1862–1938), who would later espouse utopist politics. Warren's mother was the daughter of Dorus Clarke, a Congregationalist minister and she, "a powerful and dominant personality", was the parent who was most often present in the children's lives. Warren was influenced by her father's charity toward his millworkers, having built family housing units with water and electricity for them, at a time when millworkers typically were required to live in basic dormitories provided by their employers. After 1863, when the family purchased property on Boston's Beacon Hill, the Cedar Hill estate became a summer home. As a confirmation that the family had attained the pinnacle of Boston society, they had portraits painted in 1871 by Alexandre Cabanel. Attending private schools and supplementing her education with trips to Europe to study music and language, Warren graduated in 1873.