One of the Troy Female Seminary’s most important former students was Margaret Olivia Slocum. She is best known as Mrs. Russell Sage, for as the second wife of the Wall Street titan and railroad executive, she ensured that significant chunks of his wealth funded philanthrophic efforts all over the northeast.
In chronicling the history of every graduate of the Seminary, by then known as the Emma Willard School, Mrs. Sage also chronicled her own family history:
“Her father was the sixth lineal descendant of Miles Standish … From that stalward defender of New England liberty Joseph Slocum inherited an invincible integrity, by which he was alike distinguished in prosperity and adversity … The mother came of Puritan ancestry as well, reaching back on the maternal side to Col. Henry Pierson, of Long Island, one of the founders of the present Common School system of this country, and brother of Abraham Pierson, first president of Yale College ….
“From such parentage it follows that Margaret Olivia Slocum was blessed with rare mental endowments, and a harmony of character that have signally qualified her for an active and conspicuously useful career.”
She grew up in Syracuse, spent two years at the Troy Female Seminary (1846-47), then returned to Syracuse. When her father suffered financial reverses, she became a teacher, first for many years at St. Paul’s Female School in Syracuse, and later at a renowned private school in Philadelphia, where she taught for two years “until her over-taxed strength required a respite.” At some point, she met Troy native Russell Sage, then living in New York City, and became his wife in 1896, and started spending his money in earnest on things like hospitals, school buildings, and women’s education.
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