Edna Browning Gladney’s early life set the stage for her future as one of Texas’ most influential child advocates. Raised by a teenage single mother in Milwaukee, she developed deep empathy for underprivileged children. Despite severe respiratory illness, she left high school at age 17 to work as an insurance clerk, helping to support her mother and sister.
In 1904, Gladney moved to Fort Worth to live with her grandmother and began forging relationships through the city’s women’s civic and philanthropic organizations—connections that would later prove essential to her advocacy work. In 1906, she married flour mill owner Samuel William Gladney. After spending their first year together in Havana, Cuba, the couple returned to Texas and settled first in Wolfe City, then in Sherman, where Sam purchased a flour mill in 1913.
In Sherman, Gladney joined the Sherman Civic League and focused on strengthening the county’s poor farm—a public institution that housed and fed those who needed assistance, often in exchange for farm labor. Troubled by the conditions she encountered, she pushed for reforms and expanded services. Inspired by progressive childcare models in New York and Chicago, she established and funded a free daycare facility in 1918 for the children of flour mill workers…