This is a transcription of the Emma Manning Huntley biography from New Hampshire Women: A Collection of Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Daughters and Residents of the Granite State, Who are Worthy Representatives of their Sex in the Various Walks and Conditions of Life, The New Hampshire Publishing Co., Concord, NH, 1895, page 91.
Emma (Manning) Huntley
THE power of expression, in voice and movement, is one of Nature’s greatest gifts to man, and upon the proper development and culture of that power depends in large measure his usefulness and influence in the world at large. The competent and faithful teacher of elocution and physical culture in our institutions of public instruction fills, therefore, a position of no small importance. Among the most eminent of this class is Mrs. Emma Manning Huntley, daughter of Isaac and Harriet (Chapin) Manning, who was born in the city of Nashua, Sept. 7, 1851. Her great-great-grandparents on her mother’s side were James and Mary (Gibson) McColley, who were the first white children born in the town of Hillsborough, N. H., and to whom the Governor of the state gave the tract of land which is now Hillsborough Bridge, upon condition that they would marry. Their parents were among the first Scotch-Irish settlers of Londonderry, N. H. Her grandmother on her father’s side was Mary Miller of Portsmouth, a descendant of Governor Wentworth. Mrs. Huntley received her early education in the Nashua public schools and the Nashua Literary Institute. She began study of elocution in Boston in January, 1877, and since then has devoted her whole time to reading and the teaching of elocution and physical training, and was for several years well known in New England as a public reader of well merited popularity. At present she is teacher of these branches of study in the Lowell High School, Rogers Hall School for Young Ladies, Lowell, Mass., and at Mitchell’s Boys’ School, Billerica, Mass. Prior to this she had charge of these special branches in the public schools of Nashua. She also devotes considerable time to private pupils. She is an active member of the National Association of Elocutionists, the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, and the Middlesex Women’s Club of Lowell. Mass.