Edith Lesley - Early Life

Early Life

Edith Lesley was born in a province of New Granada, now the nation of Panama living there until about 1874 when her family moved to Bangor, Maine; Alonzo Lesley had grown up in nearby Carmel, Maine and Rebecca Cousens Lesley was from Trenton, Maine.2 Alonzo Lesley worked as a shoemaker in Bangor. Edith's sister Olive May Lesley was born in December, 1875 in Bangor.3

Edith Lesley attended public elementary school in Bangor.4 It is not clear whether she graduated from Bangor High School, or instead attended private classes with Helen L. Newman, who opened Miss Newman's School in Bangor in about 1890.5 From the late 1870s Rebecca Lesley took in boarders, first at the family's rented home at 7 Adams Street, Bangor, and later at their home at One Broadway.6

In 1891 the Lesley family moved to Boston, Massachusetts before settling permanently in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alonzo Lesley continued to work as a shoemaker.7 At some time between 1891 and about 1898, Edith Lesley received training in kindergarten education at the Anne L. Page Kindergarten School, Boston, which followed the precepts of Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel, widely credited as the inventor of the concept of the kindergarten and an advocate of early childhood education. By 1898 both she and her sister Olive were working as kindergarten teachers at the Riverside School in Cambridge. Later both would move to the Houghton School (which replaced the Riverside).8

Between 1904 and 1908 Edith Lesley attended Radcliffe College as a special student, studying philosophy with Josiah Royce, Hugo Munsterberg, and George Herbert Palmer.9 She may have taken these classes to prepare to open her school.