Edwina Whitney
Edwina Maud Whitney was an American librarian and educator who served as the first professional College Librarian at the Connecticut Agricultural College from 1900 to 1934. She was also Assistant Professor of German from 1926 to 1934. Active in the college and community, Whitney founded the college's Women's Club in 1903 and served as president for six years. She retired as Librarian Emeritus with an honorary degree of Master of Letters. Her 100th birthday party was attended by university president Homer D. Babbidge and provost emeritus Albert E. Waugh.
A native of Storrs, Whitney graduated from Middletown High School and earned a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from Oberlin College in 1894. She taught German and English at Milwaukee College in Wisconsin for one year before returning to teach at Windsor High School. She taught high school for four years. She also completed a summer library science course at Amherst College. She was a member of the American Library Association and the Connecticut Library Association.
UConn's first building was Whitney Hall, former site of a Civil War orphanage founded by Edwina's parents, Edwin and Minerva. The orphanage closed in 1875 and was sold in 1878 to Augustus Storrs. In 1881, Storrs donated the buildings and 50 acres of land to the state in 1881 to found Storrs Agricultural College. Whitney Hall was condemned in 1928 and razed in 1932.
Opened in 1938, the Edwina Whitney Residence Hall on UConn's Storrs campus is named in Whitney's honor. So is the Edwina Whitney Library in the Storrs Congregational Church, of which she was a lifelong congregant. Whitney donated her diaries, which span 1901 through 1952, to the Mansfield Historical Society in 1960. She never married and had no issue.
Edwina Whitney died at the age of 102 at the Natchaug Hospital in Mansfield. She is interred in Storrs Cemetery, on a hill overlooking the UConn campus. Her obituary in the Hartford Courant described her as the "First Lady of Mansfield."
