Photo courtesy of The Conservation Society of San Antonio.
Born in San Antonio on October 7, 1888, she started drawing sketches at 10 years of age while at the Ursuline Academy, where she was boarded after her mother passed away. She began formal art studies at the San Antonio Female Institute with sculptor Pompeo Coppini in 1902, before moving to Chicago in 1905 to continue her education at the Art Institute of Chicago.
By her second year at the prestigious school, she began teaching at the Institute to help pay for her tuition, and soon she started teaching at Hull House as a volunteer. She would go on to teach at various schools for girls and at the Francis Parker School, where she taught until 1917 when she returned to San Antonio. Back at home, she continued her teaching career at Brackenridge High School, and in 1920 she taught at a mountain mission in Charles Town, West Virginia. Later, she expanded her creative skills by working as a stage designer in New York City and performing as a puppeteer in Massachusetts, which later would prove crucial for her role in conservation.
She returned to San Antonio in the early 1920s, and in 1924 joined forces with Rena Maverick Green to assemble a group of prominent San Antonians to prevent the paving over of a section of the San Antonio River. Edwards used her artistic skills to put on a puppet show for city commissioners — an interpretation of the fable “The Goose and the Golden Eggs,” in which the goose represented the river, and the eggs represented aspects of city culture that benefited from the river. Her persuasive display won the commissioners over, and that section of the river is now known as the San Antonio River Walk.
This important victory led to the formalization of the Conservation Society, for which she served as its first president from 1924 to 1926. Leaving the Society in capable hands, she continued her artistic pursuit, spending the next decade traveling frequently to Mexico to study with famed muralist Diego Rivera, which whom she forged a lasting friendship. From the 1950s onward, Edwards spent the rest of her life in San Antonio, where she died on February 16, 1980.
Emily Edwards is one of the most important figures to credit for the preservation of San Antonio’s invaluable history, architecture and cultural diversity, paving the way for generations to come.
