Poet and children’s author Emily Huntington Miller stayed at Lake Chapala in 1911

Prolific author Emily Huntington was born on 22 October 1833 in Brooklyn, Connecticut, and died on 2 November 1913. Though Wikipedia claims that she died in Mexico City, contemporaneous newspapers make it clear that she died of heart trouble at her home in St. Paul, Minnesota, a few days after her eightieth birthday.

Huntington, who graduated in 1857 from Oberlin College, Ohio, married John E Miller in 1860. Their only daughter died in infancy. One of their three sons, Harry (born in about 1862) became a mining engineer in Mexico; in 1908, he married 24-year-old, Pachuca-born Sara Smith, in the city of Guanajuato.

Emily Huntington Miller, c 1883 (Public domain)

Huntington founded or co-founded several children’s magazines, including The Little Corporal and St. Nicholas. She was also an Associate Editor of The Ladies Home Journal, and Dean of Women at Northwestern University in Illinois.

In 1860, she married John E. Miller. Of their children, three sons survived, including George A. Miller; their only daughter died in infancy.

Huntington, “the well known authoress,” stayed at the Hotel Ribera (aka Hotel Ribera Castellanos) in February 1911. The hotel, described in some detail by journalist Winifred Martin a couple of years earlier, subsequently had close associations with several other well-known literary figures, including D. H. Lawrence.

Emily Huntington Miller’s works include The Little corporal (1874); The parish of Fair Haven (1876); Fighting the enemy (1877); The house that Johnny rented (1877); Little neighbors (1879); Uncle Dick’s Legacy (1879); A year at Riverside Farm (1879); Kathie’s experience (1886); Debt and credit: a story of Acadia (1886); Thorn-apples (1887); What happened on a Christmas eve (1888); The royal road to fortune (1889); Helps and hindrances (1892); Songs from the nest (1894); and The adventures of a small boy (1923). In addition, she composed hundreds of poems, dozens of which were subsequently set to music, and many hymns.

Lake Chapala: A Postcard History (2022) uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of the Hotel Ribera and how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.

Sources

• Star Tribune: 16 Nov 1913, 28.
• San Francisco Examiner: 4 November 1913, 1.
• The Mexican Herald: 17 Feb 1911, 7.
• New York Times. 1913. “Mrs. Emily Huntington Miller” (obit). New York Times, 5 November 1913.

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Tony Burton

Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).

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