In 1854, John Hart Willard was selling off the family farm on the Wynantskill in Troy. In 1838, John (with wife Sarah Lucretia Hudson) had taken over the Troy Female Seminary founded by his mother, Emma Willard in 1821. I’m not sure of the precise location, but it can’t have been far from the where the school is today; perhaps it was the same land. It contained “one hundred acres of very choice land, in high condition, most of it well adapted to gardening purposes, or the whole entirely suitable for a Milk Dairy.” And who wouldn’t jump at the chance to own two houses, “the best barn in the county,” sheds, waggon house, a piggery and an ice house? There was also an extensive orchard and livestock.
It’s unlikely that selling off the farm left John with nowhere to sleep but the seminary’s attic. Emma Willard’s papers are filled with land deals all over the place. At this time, the Troy Female Seminary was located in the heart of Troy, on land now familiar to us as Russell Sage College.
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