Cornelia Lyman Warren was born on March 21, 1857, at her family's estate, Cedar Hill in Waltham, Middlesex County, Massachusetts to Susan Cornelia and Samuel Dennis Warren. Her father was a self-made businessman and the founder the Cumberland Paper Mills in Westbrook, Maine, who amassed a fortune and established a trust fund to support his six children: Samuel II, who would become a businessman and lawyer; Henry, who was later a noted linguistic scholar; Ned, who grew up to be a collector of art and antiquities; and Fiske, who would later espouse utopist politics. Warren's mother was the daughter of Dorus Clarke, a Congregationalist minister and she, "a powerful and dominant personality", was the parent who was most often present in the children's lives. Warren was influenced by her father's charity toward his millworkers, having built family housing units with water and electricity for them, at a time when millworkers typically were required to live in basic dormitories provided by their employers. After 1863, when the family purchased property on Boston's Beacon Hill, the Cedar Hill estate became a summer home. As a confirmation that the family had attained the pinnacle of Boston society, they had portraits painted in 1871 by Alexandre Cabanel. Attending private schools and supplementing her education with trips to Europe to study music and language, Warren graduated in 1873. Passing the entrance examinations given by Harvard University, she elected to be privately tutored by George Herbert Palmer and George Holmes Howison for the next three years, rather than pursue a university degree.
Career
Warren was part of a group of friends which included Emily Greene Balch, Katharine Coman, and Vida Scudder, all of whom had ties to Wellesley College. As was expected of women of her social class Warren became involved in social betterment schemes, such as the Fatherless and Widow's Society, for which she served as trustee beginning in 1879; the Boston Home for Incurables, of which she became a trustee in 1884; as well as providing funds for educational facilities like the Bradford Academy in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the in San Sebastián, Spain; Robert College in Constantinople; and the Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. She inherited Cedar Hill in 1888 and showed business acumen in the running of the estate, adding a farm, which utilized environmentally friendly agricultural processes and a dairy, which incorporated the era's ideas of sanitary processing. In 1889, she and her Wellesley circle founded the College Settlement Association, along with women from other New England colleges. In her management of the family businesses, she drove the plan to establish profit-sharing for the employees at both the mill in 1891 and her farm at Cedar Hill. The plan was devised to increase worker confidence as well as their earnings. Having written poetry since childhood, in 1892, Warren published a novel, Miss Wilton, extolling the virtues of both Americanism and Christianity, to mixed reviews. That same year, she became the treasurer of the College Settlement Association and would serve in that capacity for the next eight years. 1892 was also the year that the Associations' Denison House opened, which had been paid for with monies supplied by Warren. The settlement house worked to provide links to education and employment for women and included access to a library, nursery, school, and a gymnasium, the latter of which was purchased by Warren. In 1896, though she had long opened the grounds of Cedar Hill for social events, Warren constructed a maze on the property ofsilver spruce for the enjoyment of herself and neighbors. When Helena Dudley, the director of Denison House from 1893 to 1912, retired, Warren built her a house at Cedar Hill. Dudley lived there until Warren's death in 1921. In 1900, Warren joined the Board of Trustees for Wellesley College, but increasingly, was responsible for the care of her mother until she died in 1901. In 1903, Warren provided funding for a renovation of the Warren Block, a building used for social activities in the town. She also equipped the Warren Manual Training School, which provided trade education to both boys and girls, and provided the monies for the community tennis courts and pool. In 1908, she published A Memorial of My Mother. In 1913, after having served thirteen years on the board for Wellesley, she gave up the post, which her brother Fiske described as the happiest work of her life.
