Cornelia Lyman Warren

Cornelia Lyman Warren (March 21, 1857 - June 5, 1921) became one of the best-known philanthropists in New England. She was a trustee of Wellesley College, bought the location for Denison House and ran a model farm in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Cornelia Lyman Warren was born on March 21, 1857, at Cedar Hill, the family estate at Waltham, Massachusetts, one of five surviving children of a wealthy Boston, Massachusetts family. She was the daughter of Samuel Dennis Warren (1817-1888), who founded the Cumberland Paper Mills in Maine, and Susan Cornelia Clarke (1825-1901), the daughter of Dorus Clarke. She had four siblings: Samuel Dennis Warren II (1852-1910), lawyer and businessman; Henry Clarke Warren (1854-1899), scholar of Sanskrit and Pali; Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928), art collector who donated the Warren cup to the British Museum; and Fredrick Fiske Warren (1862-1938), political radical and utopist.

Warren was painted by Alexandre Cabanel in 1871, when she was thirteen. She is wearing a riding habit and carrying a whip, and is in something of a Sir Joshua Reynolds posture — stature as status; the artist's way to claim hereditary aristocratic rank for her. She often went to France with her mother and spent some time there studying music. She spoke French fluently and became an accomplished musician. She also studied with Nathaniel Hooper, and passed the college entrance examinations devised and administered by Harvard in 1876, but she did not go on to college. She said (apparently as an explanation for not going) that her interests were in social service and philosophy; she did study privately, for three years, with professors from Harvard (George Herbert Palmer) and from M.I.T. (George Holmes Howison). Perhaps her not going to college was also her mother's wish; at least her brother Sam in later life spoke of her having sacrificed her life to their mother.

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