Mina Miller Edison
(1865-1947)
BIRTH
July 6, 1865
PLACE
Akron, Ohio
NAME
Mina Miller
DEATH
August 24, 1947
PLACE
West Orange, New Jersey
FAMILY
HOMES
RELIGIOUS VIEWS
CHRISTIAN
METHODIST
MEMBERSHIPS
BIRD AND TREE CLUB PRESIDENT, CHAUTAUQUA ASSOCIATION MEMBER, DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION NATIONAL CHAPLAIN, JOHN BURROUGHS ASSOCIATION MEMBER, NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY MEMBER, SCHOOL GARDEN ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA MEMBER
AWARDS
Mina Miller Edison (1865–1947) was a civic organiser, conservation advocate and Thomas Edison’s second wife. She managed Glenmont’s household and gardens, owned the property from 1891 and raised their children and served organisations including the Audubon Society, Chautauqua’s Bird and Tree Club and the School Garden Association. Widowed, she married Edward Everett Hughes and later resumed the Edison name. Her civic work extended beyond her husband’s laboratory.
EARLY LIFE
Mina Miller was born on July 6, 1865, in Akron, Ohio, one of the eleven children of Lewis Miller, an inventor and manufacturer of farm machinery, and Mary Valinda Alexander. Her father was a cofounder of the Chautauqua Institution in New York, a center of adult education, and Mina grew up in a prosperous and religious Methodist household. She attended school in Akron and then studied at a finishing school in Boston. In 1885 she met Thomas Edison, whose first wife, Mary, had died in 1884. Edison reportedly taught her Morse code and proposed to her by tapping out the message in her hand.
Mina married Thomas Edison in Akron on February 24, 1886, and they settled at Glenmont, a mansion in Llewellyn Park, West Orange, New Jersey. They had three children, Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore. Charles later served as governor of New Jersey.
Mina managed the large household, raised Edison's children from his first marriage along with her own, and supported community causes. She was active in the Chautauqua movement, women's clubs, and local education.
After Edison's death in 1931, she married Edward Everett Hughes in 1935 and was widowed again in 1940. She died at West Orange on August 24, 1947.
CAREER
DEATH
Mina Miller Edison was a civic organiser, conservation advocate and Thomas Edison’s second wife. Mina married Thomas Edison in Akron on February 24, 1886, and they settled at Glenmont, a mansion in Llewellyn Park, West Orange, New Jersey. After Edison's death in 1931, she married Edward Everett Hughes in 1935 and was widowed again in 1940. Charles later served as governor of New Jersey. Mina managed the large household, raised Edison's children from his first marriage along with her own, and supported community causes. She was active in the Chautauqua movement, women's clubs, and local education. Mina Miller Edison died aged 82 on August 24, 1947, in Glenmont, the Edison family home in New Jersey. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.
POPULAR BIOGRAPHIES
Mina Miller Edison, the civic advocate and Thomas Edison’s second wife. Smoot and Albion provide family and local history; the Edison biographies concern her husband. Five dedicated biographies were not identified. These editorial selections include biographies where available, with personal writings, collective biography, reference works and related studies clearly labelled.
1. The Edisons of Fort Myers: Discoveries of the Heart — Tom Smoot. [Family biography and local history] Find on Amazon
2. The Florida Life of Thomas Edison — Michele Wehrwein Albion. [Related family and biographical history] Find on Amazon
3. Edison — Edmund Morris. [Related biography of her husband] Find on Amazon
4. Edison: A Biography — Matthew Josephson. [Related biography of her husband] Find on Amazon
5. Edison: Inventing the Century — Neil Baldwin. [Related biography of her husband] Find on Amazon
102260