Hubbard, Elbert Green, 1856-1915

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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.

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Birth 1856-06-19

Death 1915-05-07

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