Emma Kemp's Corset Parlor (340 Main Street)

Raised on a farm in nearby Webster, Massachusetts, Kemp came to the city with sewing skills that she used as a Main Street corsetiere in the early 20th century. She opened a corset parlor in 1905 which provided a very upscale corset-buying experience in Worcester. She later shifted to running the business from her home in the Elm Park neighborhood west of downtown.

Emma Kemp was born in the summer of 1852, more than ten years before a corset had been factory-made in the city of Worcester. Women were wearing hoop skirts, southern plantations had slave labor, and California was the only western state. 

As a young woman, Kemp took a different route from her family of farmers in the small town of Webster, Massachusetts. She worked in a local shoe factory. By 1880 she had changed jobs, adapting skills learned at the shoe factory to begin a period of self-employment as a dressmaker in Webster. She brought that sewing skill with her to Worcester where her husband Charles was employed by the Royal Worcester Corset Company as first a cutter then a foreman at the 566 Main Street location. After his untimely death from consumption, she became a corsetiere sometime around the turn of the century, moving repeatedly after Charles' death: 3 Chatham Street Place, 5 Lowell, 66 Chatham, 4 Dayton, 17 Roxbury, 104 Highland, 3 Midland, 60 Dover. The business moved with her. 

In 1905 she opened what she called "corset parlors" at the posh downtown address of State Mutual Building, rooms 709-710, 340 Main Street.  She joined a growing list of corset-making businesses that had operated on Worcester's main street during the first decades of corset making in the city: H.H. Dayton (124 Main), the Misses Hayden (141 Main), Worcester Corset Company (564 and 566 Main), J. Medina (292 Main), L.L. Pierce (285 Main), L.S. Purinton (377 Main), Mrs. J. Thompson (503 Main), and Mary Costello (339 Main). Her parlors were probably the fanciest yet for a Main Street corsetiere and would have impressed her clients who entered a grand main lobby as they headed up for a fitting. 340 Main Street was:

"… the first skyscraper of Worcester, built as the second State Mutual Building when the business outgrew the first. It is a nine story, steel-frame structure faced with dressed white marble. The building is of extremely ornate Renaissance Revival design. It was regarded as 'the first modern office building in the city' at the time of its construction. Planned as a lavish corporate symbol, it contained a large interior court with a grand staircase and an arcaded loggia at the second story."

(fn "State Mutual Life Assurance Company Building , Worcester, MA, 1895, Peabody & Stearns,"

www.stcroixarchitecture.com/products/state-mutual-life-assurance-company-building-worcester-ma-1895-peabody-stearns

She worked from that address for a year then packed up all those fabrics, laces, threads, sewing machines, potted palms, and style books, and returned to work-from-home. By 1910 she had saved enough money to buy a house in the new Elm Park neighborhood west of downtown where she lived until 1921. She died in August 1928 as she was packing up to return to Worcester during a visit with a niece in Wisconsin. She had made the same move that thousands of Americans made in the last years of the 19th century: from small agricultural town to small manufacturing city.  Her journey included many years of self-employment, a short-lived marriage, and decades hunched over a sewing machine.

ancestry.com

A Proper Fit (Working Title), Anne Marie Murphy. TidePool Press 2025. cityofcorsets.com

familysearch.com

Worcester city directories

www.stcroixarchitecture.com/products/state-mutual-life-assurance-company-building-worcester-ma-1895-peabody-stearns