Estelle Morris Tatterson was a journalist who was instrumental in many areas of civic life in Biddeford and Saco. A member of the American Woman’s Press Association, she contributed a weekly column to The Biddeford Record when it first began publication; her column “A Little Bit of Everything,” which focused mainly on local history, was featured each Saturday from 1926-1933 in The Biddeford Journal.
An organizer of one of the first social clubs in the city, The Lotus Club, established in 1896; she was also a founder of the Biddeford High School Alumni Association and directed amateur theater productions for the high school and other local groups. She was a noted supporter of Biddeford’s McArthur Library when it was founded in 1902 and served as a trustee for the Dyer Library in Saco. She also was secretary for the York County Red Cross and worked to support the Wardwell Home, a retirement home for impoverished women in Saco.
Born in Newfield, Maine in 1852, she grew up around newspapers – her father, Edward S. Morris, was an editor. She moved with her family to Biddeford from Portland in 1866 and she graduated from Biddeford High School in 1869. After working briefly as a teacher in Massachusetts, she returned to the area, where she met and married Harry Tatterson, an attorney who later became the principal of Birch Street Grammar School. They settled at 98 Temple Street in Saco and had two children.
In eulogizing her, a friend remarked, “The personality of Mrs. Tatterson was a rare and gracious one and she had a remarkable faculty of winning devoted friends. Wherever she went chance acquaintances became warm friends, and those friendships once made, were whole-hearted and lasting.”
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Biddeford Journal staff and newsboys, June 30, 1912
At the same time, Tatterson was described as being possessed of “a rare wit” and was not above playing along with unusual requests, such as an odd freelance job she took for a year for which she wrote a column that appeared in a Texas newspaper in the guise of a New York society lady reporting on the gossip and happenings of the Big Apple. Though she was not in good health in the final years of her life, she did not fall seriously ill until the time of her death in January 1934. She was 81 years old.
