Let me transcribe a few sentences written by Mr. Frank Chapin Bray, who as Editor of The Chautauquan Magazine, was for years in close relation with Miss Kimball.
Many will always think of her as a kind of Chautauqua Mother Superior. The details of the work of an Executive Secretary are not transcribable for they were multifarious drudgeries year after year which defy analysis. During thirty-five years she made them the means of transmitting a great idea as a dynamic force vital to hundreds of thousands of men and women the world around.
Next to the originating genius of John H. Vincent, the influence which made the Chautauqua Home Reading Course one of the mightiest educational forces of the nineteenth century was the tireless energy and the executive ability of Kate F. Kimball.
About 1912 she was suddenly taken with an illness, not deemed serious at the time, but later found to have been a slight paralytic shock. She was given a year's vacation from office work and spent most of it in England and on the continent. Some of her friends think that if she had absolutely abstained from work, she might have recovered her health; but while in England she visited nearly all its great cathedrals, and wrote a series of articles for The Chautauquan on "An English Cathedral Journey," afterward embodied in one of the best of the non-technical books on that subject. She returned to her desk, but not in her former vigor. Year by year her powers of thought and action declined, and she died June 17, 1917, in the fifty-seventh year of her age, leaving after her not only a precious memory but an abiding influence; for the plans initiated by her adaptive mind are still those effective in the shaping of the Chautauqua Circle.
Hall of the Christ
Entrance to the Hall of Philosophy