Although her Father had moved to California after serving as
Governor of Missouri (1844-1848), Emma preferred to spend much of her time in
Idaho. After her marriage to John C. Green, a Boise Basin miner, they took
up a land claim along Emma Creek and Green Creek, and lived there for many
summers. Her seal design designated Syringa which blooms on the hills near
this marker, as Idaho's State Flower.
From the Idaho
Secretary of State website:
IDAHO HAS THE ONLY GREAT SEAL
DESIGNED BY A WOMAN
Idaho became a state on July 3, 1890 and that
same summer a talented young woman came to the state capitol at Boise to visit
relatives. Emma Sarah Etine Edwards (later she married mining man James G.
Green) was the daughter of John C. Edwards, a former Governor of Missouri
(1844-48) who had emigrated to Stockton, California where he acquired large land
holdings, a beautiful French Creole wife, Emma Catherine Richards, and became
Mayor of Stockton, in about that order.
Emma, eldest of a family of eight, was
exceptionally well educated for a woman of that period and when she dropped into
Boise, it was on her way home from a year spent at art school in New York.
However, what was to be a very short visit turned into a lifelong stay, for she
fell in love with the charming city and its people and opened art classes where
the young pioneers of the community learned to paint.
Shortly after her classes started, she was
invited to enter a design for the Great Seal of the State of Idaho. Acting on
Concurrent Resolution No. 1, adopted by the First Legislature of the newest
state in the union, a committee was appointed from that body and instructed to
offer a prize of one hundred dollars for the best design submitted.
Artists from all over the country entered the
competition, but the unanimous winner was young Emma Edwards, who became the
first and only woman to design the Great Seal of a State.
She was handed the honorarium by Governor
Norman B. Willey on March 5, 1891. The state flag also carries the seal centered
on a deep blue background.
Emma Edwards Green had no children of her own,
but assisted in rearing a nephew, Darell B. Edwards, a distinguished Oakland
attorney. Ralph Edwards of "This is Your Life," also a nephew, shows a
valid artistic strain flourished in the Edwards family.
Mrs. Green died in Boise January 6, 1942. She
was buried beside her husband in Oakland, California.