Born in Plainfield, New Jersey to parents of means, young Margaret Goddard left the comfort of home's hearth to pursue study in art. Attending the Art Students League in New York (1898-99), she provided the illustrations for a children's book, The Making of Meenie (1904).

At some point, she established a connection with Byrdcliffe, a Utopian arts and crafts community in Woodstock, New York. This art colony was established in 1903 by the son of a millionaire Yorkshire textile baron, Ralph Whitehead, and his American wife, Jane Byrd McCall. Inspired by the writing of John Ruskin, Whitehead envisioned a counter movement to industrialization in which beauty and the finely-made object would prevail. Attracting progressive thinkers...