It’s rather extraordinary that the 16th child (out of 17) of a Connecticut farmer, a female born in 1787, would become one of the leaders in women’s education. But at 17, Emma Hart became a teacher, soon distinguishing herself and receiving offers from various schools, and becoming the head of the Female Academy at Middlebury, Vermont.
While there, she met and married Dr. John Willard, 28 years her senior. Willard found himself in financial difficulty following the War of 1812, and Emma Willard decided to open her own school in Middlebury in order to help the family’s finances. It was not long before Waterford’s General Van Schoonhoven induced her to come to our area to open an academy. She spent two years in Waterford in rented quarters, struggling to get a proper school building paid for, but local and state efforts were unsuccessful.
The City of Troy raised $4000 in tax money and further private subscriptions to bring her across the river to establish the Troy Female Seminary, the first school for higher education of women in the United States, in September 1821. It was located at 85 Second Street, between Congress and Ferry, on what is now the Russell Sage College campus. She continued to head the school until 1838, turning it over to her son and daughter-in-law, while she re-married (Dr. Willard had died in 1825) and focused her attentions on the education of teachers through the new establishment of “normal” schools in Connecticut. She returned to Troy in 1844, living in a house on the Seminary grounds at the corner of Second and Ferry. She died there in 1870. It wasn’t until 1895 that the school was renamed for her; in 1910 it moved to its current campus at Mount Ida.
There is much more about Emma Willard’s life in a history of the school written by another woman well-noted for her devotion to women’s education, Mrs. Russell Sage, “Emma Willard and Her Pupils.”
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