Candace Wheeler (1827–1923), often credited as the "mother" of interior design, was one of America's first woman interior and textile designers. She is famous for helping to open the field of interior design to women, making decorative art affordable, and for encouraging a new style of American design. Associated with the Colonial Revival, Aesthetic Movement, and the Arts and Crafts Movement throughout her long career, Wheeler was considered a national authority on home decoration. Wheeler was a member of the Associated Artists, along with Louis Comfort Tiffany. She founded the Society of Decorative Art in New York City (1877), and created similar artistic societies across the country. Wheeler is also noted for designing the interior of the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL. Candace Wheeler was born Candace Thurber on March 24, 1827 in Delhi, New York west of the Catskill Mountains (which would serve as the inspiration for her development of Onteora). Her parents were Abner and Lucy Thurber. Candace was the third born of eight siblings: Lydia Ann Thurber(1824-?), Charles Stewart Thurber (1826–1888), Horace Thurber (1828–1899), Lucy Thurber (1834–1893), Millicent Thurber (1837–1838), Abner Dunham Thurber (1839–1899), and Francis Beattie Thurber (1842–1907). Wheeler led a happy a childhood, though she expressed annoyance at how their father raised them "a hundred years behind the time" (6, Peck and Irish). Her father was strictly Presbyterian but also a strict abolitionist. He ensured that the family never used any product made by slaves. So concerned was this endeavor of Abner, that the family used homemade maple sugar instead of cane sugar and linen woven from flax they grew on their farm instead of southern cotton. Candace attended an infant school and later, when she was old enough, the Delaware Academy in Delhi And despite her complaints about her father was often actively encouraged by him to write poetry, to paint, and to generally be creative and imaginative. Later in her life she was a champion of women remaining in the home, which represented a paradigm shift from her own life. In terms of her artistic work she was the lead on over 9,000 designs for notable individuals such as Mark Twain. She died of Tertiary syphilis in late 1923.