Emily Malbone Morgan

Emily Malbone Morgan (December 10, 1862 – February 27, 1937) was a prominent social and religious leader in the Episcopal Church in the United States who helped found the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross as well as the Colonel Daniel Putnam Association.

Emily Malbone Morgan, born in Hartford, Connecticut, was the youngest child and only daughter born to merchant Henry Kirke Morgan (1819-1911) and his devout wife, the former Emily Malbone Brinley (1824-1907). Emily Morgan never married and ultimately survived all her brothers: Edward (1857-1874), Henry (1854-1931), William (1850-?), and George (1848-1908).

Her parents could trace their ancestry to colonial times, and her brother George became a prominent Episcopal priest and Rector of Christ Church in New Haven, Connecticut in 1887 (a position he held until his death in an automobile accident two decades later). The house in which she was born and raised had previously belonged to the parents of J. Pierpont Morgan

Emily was mostly home schooled by her mother (including via travel to Europe), and throughout her life had many operations for thyroid and other conditions, but became known for her good humor and management gifts. The family belonged to Trinity Church in Hartford, and her mother corresponded with some in the Oxford Movement. Emily briefly attended Miss Haines's school in Hartford. As a teenager, Emily became interested in writing, as well as involved in girls' clubs and an organization called the United Workers.

In 1883, Morgan's childhood friend, Adelyn Howard, fell ill with a hip disease, which made her a lonely invalid in a town in which she had no friends or family. The following year, Morgan, with Howard and Harriet Hastings of Wellesley, Massachusetts founded the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, to allow the shut-in Adelyn—and other religious women who valued thanksgiving, intercessory prayer, and simplicity of life—to pray and work for social justice. Morgan had a talent for providing hospitality, and considered her "greatest desire...has always been to make tired people rested and happy." The group ministered to women working in the nearby textile mills, in part by establishing houses throughout the northeastern United States where such working class women and their children could vacation.

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