Kitty Haas was born in Europe on July 27, 1923. In 1940, Haas emigrated with her parents to the United States from Vienna, Austria, where they had lived for two years after the Nazi occupation. Following her move, Haas became interested in art and studied painting with Hans Hoffman and Hyram Gross in New York. She also developed an interest in American history, specifically the Shaker community. Haas worked with the Sabbathday Shakers to replicate the old tins they used for herbs and received her first order from Bloomingdale’s in New York. She developed a similar passion for the Roycroft movement soon after. Later in life, Haas merged her interests in history and art to open boutique and antique stores in Greenwich Village, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; Nantucket, Massachusetts; and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sources:

Berkowitz, Bram. "Ninety-two-year-old starts own website". Wicked Local, May 27, 2016. https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/belmont-citizen-herald/2016/05/27/ninety-two-year-old-starts/28235821007/ (accessed September 12, 2024).

"Kitty Haas in the U.S., Public Records Index, 1950-1993, Volume 1". Ancestry, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/discoveryui-content/view/21152066:1788?tid=&pid=&queryid=f98e6aca-8302-435c-ad1f-6e4bb53cc5b0&_phsrc=glZ13&_phstart=successSource (accessed September 12, 2024).

"Kitty Haas Shaker Collection". Willis Henry Auctions, Inc., https://www.willishenryauctions.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Kitty-Haas-Info.pdf (accessed September 12, 2024).

Elbert Green Hubbard was born in Bloomington, Illinois to Silas Hubbard and Juliana Frances Read on June 19, 1856. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a salesman for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York. In 1895, he founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York. This community developed following Hubbard's purchase of a private press, which he named the Roycroft Press. The printing business was initiated in collaboration with Hubbard's first wife, Bertha Crawford Hubbard. Although called the "Roycroft Press" by collectors and print historians, the organization called itself "The Roycrofters" and "The Roycroft Shops". Hubbard edited and published two magazines, The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest and The Fra: A Journal of Affirmation. The Roycrofters produced books printed on handmade paper and operated a fine bindery, a furniture shop, and shops producing modeled leather, ceramics, and hammered copper goods.

In 1904, Elbert Hubbard married his second wife Alice Moore after a controversial affair in which she bore an illegitimate child, Miriam Elberta Hubbard (1894–1985). Alice Moore Hubbard was a graduate of the New Thought-oriented Emerson College of Oratory in Boston and a noted suffragist. The Roycroft Shops became a site for meetings and conventions of radicals, freethinkers, reformers, and suffragists. Hubbard became a popular lecturer, and his philosophy evolved to self-described anarchism and socialism. Among Hubbard's many publications were the fourteen-volume work Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great (1894) and the short publication A Message to Garcia (1899).

Hubbard died aboard the RMS Lusitania when it was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915.

Sources:

Davis, Hilary. "The Roycroft Community". The Arts & Crafts Society, https://web.archive.org/web/20190317001940/http://www.arts-crafts.com/archive/hdavis.shtml (accessed September 12, 2024).

"Elbert Hubbard". Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_Hubbard (accessed September 12, 2024).

Roycroft, a reformist community of craft workers and artists in East Aurora, New York, was founded by Elbert Hubbard in 1895 as part of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States. Elbert Hubbard bought the Roycroft Printing Shop from Harry P. Taber on November 29, 1895. After resigning from his position in the advertising department at the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York, Hubbard became nationally famous through his writings published by the Roycroft Press and by the artists’ colony he founded. He drew inspiration from William Morris (1834-1896), the influential nineteenth-century English painter, furniture designer, poet, and socialist writer. Participants in the movement were known as Roycrofters.

The work and philosophy of the group, often referred to as the Roycroft movement, had a strong influence on the development of American architecture and design in the early twentieth-century. Roycrofters initially created The Blacksmith Shop, followed by shops specializing in copper, leather, ceramics, and wooden furniture. Hubbard applied his business knowledge and marketing experience to sell Roycroft products through catalogs sent to subscribers of his publications. Although Hubbard died in 1915, Roycroft artisans continued making books, furniture, copper, and leather goods until forced to close in 1938 after challenges following the Great Depression.

Sources:

"Roycroft". Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roycroft (accessed September 12, 2024).

Weekly, Nancy. "Remembering Kitty Turgeon". Burchfield Penney Art Center, November 22, 2014. https://burchfieldpenney.org/about/news/article:11-22-2014-12-00am-remembering-kitty-turgeon-by-nancy-weekly/ (accessed September 12, 2024).