USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The bi-centennial celebration of the settlement of Litchfield, Connecticut, August 1-4, 1920 > Part 6
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COUNTY DAY : MARY FLOYD TALLMADGE CHAPTER, D. A. R.
SARAH PIERCE: PIONEER IN WOMAN'S HIGHER EDUCATION.
Address by Mrs. George Maynard Minor.
- (President General of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution.)
The Playhouse, August 1, 1920.
Litchfield may view her educational past with justifiable pride. The impressive story of the Litchfield Law School, pioneer of its kind in America, is a proud historic background for any community. Litchfield has done better than be a "mother of kings"; she has been a mother of judges and chief justices, governors and statesmen, great ministers and emi- nent jurists. Her pioneer law school made her an educational center which was the equal, if not the superior, of any American university town of that day. But she did not stop there in her pioneering. An even greater achievement stands on her record books-an achievement that deserves to be better known than it is. This was the establishment of another pioneer school which it took courage and vision in those days to promote. I refer to the pioneer school for the higher education of women known as the "Litchfield Female Academy".
One expects men to become eminent jurists and states- men if they are able. But in the days of the Litchfield Law School no one expected women to be educated. They might acquire every feminine accomplishment that they wished- they might draw maps, work bead bags, strum a little on piano or spinnet, draw terrible creations with pencil and paint brush, but an education beyond the three R's and a little geography, never! It was unheard of; it was indeli- cate; it was unsexing and dangerous in the extreme. But there were men and women of vision in the Litchfield of those days. Judge Reeve found his counterpart in a woman. The name of Sarah Pierce, the pioneer of woman's higher educa-
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cation, should be linked with that of Tapping Reeve for all time.
It is quite fitting that the old Law School building where the law students used to listen to lectures, should now be the home of a woman's handicraft shop, where feminine handi- work replaces the calf-skin volumes of earlier days.
For did not the law students and Miss Pierce's school girls make life a wide-awake affair in old Litchfield a hundred years ago? This feminine invasion of the home of law and jurisprudence is but a symbol of woman's entrance into the fields, not only of law, but of science and politics and all departments of the world's activities; a symbol, too, of her gradual emancipation from legal disabilities of every kind. That Yale has only recently fallen into line with other col. leges and conferred the degree of doctor of laws upon a woman shows how slowly the world has followed in the pioneer pathway blazed by Judge Tapping Reeve and Sarah Pierce.
Judge Reeve was the first in this country to recognize the legal standing of women, he was the first to advocate their having equal rights with men. He believed in their equal education.
From the time when Miss Pierce opened her school in 1792 for the higher education of women with one pupil in her own dining room, he was its constant patron and friend.
In 1798 he was one on a list of subscribers to a fund for erecting the first building for the school, which was then named the "Female Academy". It stood just south of the Congregational parsonage, on what is now the Underwood property. Henry Ward Beecher, born in Litchfield in June 1813, was prepared for college by Miss Pierce. He thus speaks of these two schools:
"The Law School of Judges Reeve and Gould and the young ladies' school of the Misses Pierce made it (Litchfield) an educational center scarcely second in the breadth of its influ- ence to any in the land, and attracted a class of residents of high social position".
In 1856 he again writes that these schools "were in their day two very memorable institutions, and though since sup- plied by others on a larger scale, there are few that will have performed so much, if we take into account the earliness of
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the times and the fact that they were pioneers and parents of those that have supplanted them".
"Pioneers and parents". As such we do them honor today in this Bi-Centennial celebration; in every woman's college that has since sprung up and is appealing for funds to carry on, we see a direct descendant of Sarah Pierce's "Female Academy".
Hollister, when speaking in his "History of Connecticut" of the vast influence in law and politics which spread over the country from the brilliant minds educated at the Law School says:
"The influence of these sages upon the laws of the country was almost rivalled by the efforts of Miss Sarah Pierce in another department of learning. This lady opened a school for the instruction of females in the year 1792 while the Law School was in successful operation, and continued it under her own superintendence for nearly forty years. During this time she educated between fifteen hundred and two thousand young ladies. (John P. Brace, Miss Pierce's nephew, says that it was three thousand.) This school was for a long period the most celebrated in the United States and brought together a large number of the most gifted and beautiful women of the continent".
. At the Centennial Celebration of the County of Litchfield in August, 1851, the Hon. Samuel Church, Chief Justice of Connecticut, made an address in which he thus describes Miss Pierce's School :
"A new tone to female education was given by the estab- lishment of a Female Seminary for the instruction of females in this village, by Miss Sarah Pierce in 1792. This was an untried experiment. Hitherto, the education of young ladies with few exceptions had been neglected. The district school had limited their course of studies. Miss Pierce saw and regretted this, and devoted all of her active life to the mental and moral culture of her sex. The experiment succeeded entirely. This Academy soon became the resort of young ladies from all portions of the country-from the cities and the towns. Then the country was preferred as most suitable for female improvement, away from the frivolities and dissipation of fashionable life. Now a different, not a better
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practice prevails. Many of the grandmothers and mothers of the present generation were educated as well for genteel as for useful life, in this school, and its influence upon female character and accomplishments was great and extensive".
In all these quotations one is continually reminded of a certain definition of woman found in an eighteenth century dictionary. It is as follows: "Woman, the female of man. See man".
Sarah Pierce belongs not alone to Litchfield, but to the nation. This is my chief apology for standing here today as an outsider telling Litchfield about her own past.
I have read with absorbing interest the "Chronicles" of this famous school compiled by your townswoman Mrs. Van- derpoel, and it would seem as if the last word had been said.
Miss Pierce and her school girls live again in those pages of letters and diaries and personal reminiscences. Neverthe- less, in such a subject, the last word cannot be repeated too often, therefore this paper is largely repetition and owes most of its facts to that delightful volume.
Sarah Pierce was the daughter of John Pierce and Mary Paterson, who probably lived in Farmington with the latter's father, Major Paterson, a distinguished colonial officer, and moved from there to Litchfield about 1751. The Litchfield Land Records state that "John Pierce of Litchfield" on May 15th, 1753, "Bought of Zebulon Bissell 'my home lot' 10 acres of land, barn and orchard for £1300". "John Pierce of Wethersfield" his father, had previously bought nine acres of land from John Catlin for £305, probably for this son.
These Pierces come of a long line of Pierce ancestry, dating back to John Pierce of England, patentee, who after an unsuccessful attempt to reach America in the ship "Para- gon", in 1621, assigned his patent to the Plymouth Company. His brothers, William and Michael, came over later and were ancestors of many Pierces in this country. William, "mari- ner" and "captain" of the vessels "Aime", "Lyon", and "May- flower", sailed on various occasions to Plymouth with passen- gers and cargo. He was once in command in 1629 of the one and only "Mayflower". It is more than probable, though not directly established, that some of these men were the direct ancestors of Sarah Pierce. The Patersons came of a promi-
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nent Scotch family from Dumfriesshire. James Paterson, born in Scotland in 1664, came to Wethersfield and there married a Mary Talcott. He was the great-grandfather of Sarah Pierce. After the death of Sarah's own mother, Mary Paterson, John Pierce married a Mary Goodman, of whom it is worthy of note that she was on a committee of women who appealed to the school board of Litchfield to give the girls the same studies as were prescribed for the boys. Mary Good- man was a step-mother whose forceful influence and inspira- tion are reflected in the mind and character of Sarah Pierce.
On the death of Sarah's father, the family responsibilities fell on her elder brother, Colonel John Pierce who, together with a Mr. Landon, sent Sarah and her sister Nancy to a school in New York to prepare them purposely for establishing a school in Litchfield.
This fact taken in conjunction with Mary Goodman's appeal to the school board in behalf of the girls argues the need of a girls' school other than what the town afforded.
Litchfield society in 1792 was renowned for its education and culture. The town was on the highroad of travel between New York and Albany by way of Danbury and Poughkeepsie, and between New York and Boston by way of Hartford, Dan- bury and West Point. Great, red four-horse coaches, we read, rushed daily through the town in all directions making more stir with horns and whips and clattering hoofs than their modern successor the automobile, open cut-outs and all.
Besides these long distance post roads, there were many stage lines to other county towns, to New Milford, to Canaan, to Harwinton, Cornwall, Torrington and Plymouth.
By 1820 the town had become the fourth in population in the state, being outstripped by only New Haven, Hartford and Middletown.
Litchfield was also a commercial and industrial center at this time; and we have seen how the Law School drew a brilliant company of men and women into this remote and pioneer town, making it a center of thought only sixty-four years after its foundation.
Litchfield had also had a noted record in the War of the Revolution just closed. It was the home of the prominent patriot families of Wolcotts, Seymours, Sheldons, Woodruffs,
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Demings, Bissells, Tallmadges and others too numerous to mention.
It had its weekly newspapers, its public library, and its "Lyceum" for lectures and debates.
All this was Litchfield in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth, in the early days of both schools.
In such a society there was a sympathetic atmosphere for a girls' school such as the Pierces had in mind. This was in spite of the fact that public opinion of that day confined real education to boys only.
Litchfield, like all New England towns, had made the usual provision for the public education. One sixtieth part of the township, about 700 acres, had been originally set apart for the support of schools by the first settlers.
In Kilbourne's History of Litchfield I read-and by the way, I do not feel so much of an outsider when I find that the original Indian deed of land to the settlers of Litchfield was witnessed on the part of the town by a Joseph Minor and "acknowledged" by a John Minor-in this history I read as follows:
"In December, 1725, eight pounds were appropriated from the town treasury 'for hiring school masters and school-dames' to instruct the children in reading and writing for the next year ensuing; and a like sum was ordered to be raised by a tax upon the parents or guardians of the children to be gathered by the town collector. Messrs. Marsh, Buel, Hos- ford and Goodrich were chosen a school committee. Two years later ten persons were paid out of the public treasury for the same object, with the proviso that four pounds of this sum should be given for the support of a writing school, and the balance 'for teaching of children by school-dames'- from which we are to infer that female teachers did not give instruction in writing".
In 1731 it was "Voted to build a schoolhouse in ye centre of ye town on ye Meeting-House Green". It was to be twenty feet square and be taught by a schoolmaster.
In 1729 it was voted to sell the School lands for the bene- fit of a school, but this was found to be illegal so it was voted to lease them for a term of nine hundred and ninety-
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nine years. The committee to negotiate the lease, consisting of Messrs. Marsh, Buel, Hosford and Bird, furthermore bound their successors "in ye recognisance of ten thousand pounds lawful money to give a new lease of said Right, at the end of said term of nine hundred and ninety-nine years, if there shall be occasion".
It is to be hoped that Litchfield's 1000th birthday will see that lease safely renewed.
From these lands came part at least, of the revenue for the support of this early public school for reading and writing.
This History does not record the further extent of the schooling given when Sarah Pierce began educating herself for a teacher of girls in the "higher branches". We only know that Mary Goodman and certain other women were dis- satisfied with it.
This, then, was the Litchfield into which Miss Pierce pro- jected her school.
It was not a boarding school as we understand the term, for we learn from reminiscences of Catherine Beecher, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, and a pupil of Miss Pierce, that "her school house was a small building of only one room; probably not exceeding 30 feet by 70 feet, with small closets at each end, one large enough to hold a piano, and the other used for bonnets and over garments. The plainest pine desks, long plank benches, a small table and an elevated teacher's chair constituted the whole furniture".
The girl pupils, like the law students, were boarded out among the best families of the town, a very few being taken by Miss Pierce herself into her own house, which was, how- ever, not built until 1803.
Some years there were as many as one hundred students in town belonging to each school.
Very little is known about the earliest years of the school, except what can be gleaned from the diaries of the earliest pupils and the writings of contemporaries.
The Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher moved to Litchfield in 1810 to take up his pastorate and many of the pupils were boarded in his family. His own famous children were pupils in the school. Catherine further writes: "When I began school
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there, she (Miss Pierce) was sole teacher, aided occasionally by her sister in certain classes, and by her brother-in-law in penmanship.
"At that time the 'higher branches' had not entered female schools. Map-drawing, painting, embroidery and the piano were the accomplishments sought, and history was the only study added to geography, grammar and arithmetic. In pro- cess of time her nephew, Mr. John P. Brace, became her asso- ciate, and introduced a more extended course. At the time father came, the reputation of Miss Pierce's school exceeded that of any other in the country. Miss Pierce had a great admiration for the English classies and inspired her pupils with the same. She was a good reader and often quoted or read long passages of poetry and sometimes required her pupils to commit to memory choice selections. Her daily counsels were interspersed with quotations from English classics. Even the rules of her school, read aloud every Saturday, were rounded off in Jolmsonian periods, which the roguish girls would sometimes burlesque".
Each school term closed with a dramatic exhibition, staged and costumed with every attention to detail, a strange contrast to the contemporary Puritanism. Miss Pierce wrote some very good plays herself, largely Biblical in theme. The law students attended these and added to the liveliness of the occasion. They sometimes gave plays of their own in return. Harriet Beecher Stowe writes in the "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher" of a merry prank that was played during a rehearsal of Miss Pierce's favorite drama, "Jephtha's Daughter". "It was when Jephtha, adorned with a splendid helmet of gilt paper and waving ostrich plumes, was awaiting the arrival of his general Pedazer -- his daughter's lover - who was to enter and say: 'On Jordan's banks proud Ammon's banners wave'. Miss Pierce stood looking on to criticise, when having pre-arranged the matter, a knock was heard and I ran for- ward, saying, 'walk in, Mr. Pedazer'. In he came helmet and all, saying, 'How are you, Jep?' who replied .Hullo, old fellow. Walk in and take a chair'.
"Miss Pierce was in no way discomfited, but seemed to relish the joke as much as we young folks.
"On one occasion of this sort father came in late, and
onta Slimthe
al ar
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the house being packed, he was admitted by the stage entrance. Either from accident or fun, just as he was passing over the stage, the curtain rose and the law students spied him and commenced clapping. Father stopped, bowed low, amid renewed clapping and laughter and then passed on to his seat". Mrs. Stowe also writes in her "Life" that "this school is the only one I ever knew which really carried out a thorough course of ancient and modern history. Miss Pierce with great cleverness had compiled an abridgment of ancient history from the best sources in four volumes for the use of her pupils, after which, Russell's 'Modern Europe' with Coot's con- tinuation and Ramsay's 'American Revolution' brought us down nearly to our own times". We are also told that Paley's "Moral Philosophy", Blair's "Rhetoric" and Addison's "On Taste" were among the text books used by this remarkable educator, who in addition, did not hesitate to give place in her courses to chemistry, higher mathematics, Greek, Latin and Logic.
Miss Pierce herself in an address to her graduating class at the close of school, October 29, 1818, has this to say after a few words of introduction: "It is not now necessary to enter into a discussion of the question whether the abilities of the sexes are naturally equal; it is sufficient to notice that the circumstances of life require a different exercise of those abili- ties. The employments of man and woman are so dissimilar that no one will pretend to say that an education for these employments must be conducted upon the same plan; but the discipline of the minds, the formation of those intellectual habits which are necessary in one sex are equally so to the other.
"The difference in their employments requires a difference of personal qualifications but not a difference of intellectual exertion. It is equally important to both sexes that memory should be stored with facts, that the imagination should be chastened and confined within its due and regular limits, that habits of false judgment, the result of prejudice, ignorance or error, should be destroyed or counteracted, that the reason- ing faculties should be trained to nice discriminations and powerful and regular research. Hence then, all those sciences and all those exercises which serve in our sex for those import- ant purposes should be part of a well regulated female educa-
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tion. To many these observations may appear unnecessary for they are fully convinced of the importance of this subject; but there are some who by their assertions, and more by their practice who hold the contrary opinion, and think woman occu- pies an inferior rank in creation. To confute this opinion and to practically vindicate the quality of female intellect has been our object in the course of study prescribed for you". Those were brave words in those days. Even as long afterwards as seventy-five or eighty years, it took courage for a girl to face jeers and sneers and the poking of fun for the sake of a college course. "Bluestocking" and "strong-minded" were by no means out-worn terms in the young days of the present generation of women who have sought an education equal to man's.
Our women's colleges have sprung up often in spite of an adverse public opinion. Our men's colleges have opened their courses and admitted women to their degrees with slow relue- tance during the past thirty years. England-supposedly slow to change-was far in advance of us when in 1878 women began regularly taking men's degrees at the University of London and the men's lectures and examinations at Oxford. All this proves how far in advance of her day in America was Sarah Pierce.
In 1827 the need of a larger building was felt. For the purpose of securing funds the school was incorporated by act of the General Assembly as "The Litchfield Female Aca- demy" with a capital stock not to exceed $7,500 and shares at $15 each. The long list of subscribers still exists giving the names of the most eminent men of the town. The first Board of ten trustees consisted of Frederick Wolcott, James Gould, William Buel, Phineas Miner, Seth P. Beers, Truman Smith, John P. Brace, John R. Landon, Daniel Sheldon and Jabez Huntington. The contract for the building was given to Sylvester Spencer, and the building was erected on the same lot, the old building and land being taken as stock sub- scribed by Miss Pierce herself.
In 1832 Mr. Brace resigned to take a position in the Female Seminary in Hartford, and a Trustee's notice of Octo- ber 30, 1833, speaks of Miss Pierce as having retired also, "although", it says, "she feels a deep interest in its prosperity,
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and will visit it daily * * Notwithstanding the removal of these eminent instructors, the Trustees state with high grati- fication that in their opinion this institution has never been more worthy of public confidence and patronage and its pros- pects have never been more flattering than at the present time".
Miss Pierce was succeeded by one of her own pupils, Miss Henrietta Jones and as the Trustees prophesied, the school continued to flourish under her and later principals.
In 1852 Sarah Pierce died at the age of eighty-four, having lived for twenty years after her retirement as the watchful guardian, friend and counselor of the institution she had estab- lished.
The Academy continued as a school until in 1856 it was voted by the Trustees that Miss Mary Pierce be allowed to purchase the Academy property, both land and buildings.
Mr. J. Deming Perkins in a letter published in the "Chroni- cles" states that the building was finally removed to the Beecher lot, now the late Henry R. Jones property, where it was used as a boys' school for some years. When Mr. Jones bought this lot in 1882 he turned the famous school building into the main part of his dwelling. The Beecher residence had migrated before this to "Spring Hill", where it stands as a part of this sanitarium, having been purchased and removed there by the late Dr. Henry W. Buel. Miss Pierce's own resi- dence stood until 1896 when it was torn down by Mrs. Under- wood, the latest purchaser of the Pierce lot.
Thus little that is visible is left of this pioneer enterprise, but it lives in enduring memories.
Contrary to present practice, "school kept" in summer as well as winter, there being a "winter" and a "summer" term, with from three to four weeks' recess in spring and fall.
At the end of every week Miss Pierce "told the faults" of the girls as they called it, pointing out wherein each had erred during the week, the rules were read aloud and questions asked of the girls as to their conduct both in and out of school.
Much freedom was given even in this mecca of law stu- dents, though under certain restrictions. The young men were allowed to call on certain evenings, but woe to him who transgressed the laws of strictest decorum. To be shut out from Miss Pierce's was the deepest disgrace that could befall
0
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the unhappy youth. It argues a strong and wise administra. tion on the part of Miss Pierce and loyal obedience by students of both sexes, that she could conduct a young ladies' school in such masculine surroundings as the Law School without complications.
One student, Edward Mansfield, who met his fate among the girls, thus writes of his first view of the school:
"It was about the middle of June, 1823, that my father and
I drove up to Catlin's tavern on the Green in Litchfield.
It
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