Candace Wheeler - Later Life

Later Life

After the conclusion of the Chicago World's Fair, Wheeler continued to head the family firm Associated Artists with her daughter Dora as vice-president. She continued to design textiles and came under the influence of the historicism that was sweeping the design field during the period known as The American Renaissance. Her husband, Tom Wheeler died in 1895, at the age of 77. She seems to have retired from business in 1900 and Associated Artists closed altogether in 1907. In her later years she wrote extensively on design, but also fiction for both children and adults and became an advocate for gardening. She also advocated rug making as a money making scheme for rural women, a scheme that met opposition from some women who felt Wheeler was out of touch with the aspirations of women on farms and in rural America. She recovered from breast cancer at eighty. In her later years, she spent her winters in Wintergreen, Georgia, where she designed her own cottage. In her last interview, published in Good Housekeeping when she was 93, she was described as "a handsome and erect figured women of gracious manner and striking personality..." and this took place in 1919, a year after the end of World War I, in which three of her grandchildren had been killed. She lived with her daughter Dora in her last years and according to Hazel Cutler, who had been engaged to their grandson, she remained active and well dressed until her death at the age of ninety-six.