[4][6][7] Although she enjoyed studying commercial arithmetic,[2][5] and did the accounts on her father's tobacco farm,[5] she moved to Hartford in 1914,[5] to take up a position as a housekeeper, the only paid employment open to her at that time.

[8] Tillman ran her own baking and catering service for about sixty years,[9] sometimes serving meals for visiting state dignitaries such as Governors Raymond E. Baldwin and Ella T. Grasso,[9] and whose regular customers included Dr. Thomas Hepburn, a noted Hartford Hospital urologist and father to actress Katharine Hepburn,[7] who she served as the family cook for a number of years.

[10] Throughout her lifetime, Tillman was involved in various NAACP social programs and the National Council of Negro Women.

[7] On March 9, 2007, Tillman was discussed as a major subject of a lecture by Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a professor of philosophy at Brown University, titled "Nature vs. the Tragedy of Emma Faust Tillman's Death", at the Karbank Symposium in Environmental Philosophy at Boston University.

[17] The lecture discussed issues related to environmental philosophy, particularly the value of individual human lives compared to the value of natural environments and their preservation.