[A list of the girls attending the West Town Boarding School, a Quaker school located in West Chester, Pennsylvania.]

West Chester, Pa., 22 May, 1803. 4to (10.5" x 8"), plain blue wrappers, 11 pp. ink, 12 blank pp. An early manuscript register of students written by a girl attending what would become the longest operating boarding school in the United States, including two sisters apparently absent from the school's official history.
Anna Thomas, who was among the first 250 girls to enroll at Westtown School, "which commenced 5th month 6th 1799," records the names and parents' names of her fellow female students "together with their ages, numbers of their bills of admission and places of their former residence." A small pencil x-mark appears by Anna's name (number (truncated) 210, age 12, daughter of George and Sarah Thomas, from Valley), and by that of her sister, Sarah, who had arrived the year before. Occasional entries record siblings swapping places (and register numbers) with each other ("The latter took the place of the former").
Anna's entries seem largely to align with A Brief History of Westtown Boarding School, with two notable exceptions. First, Anna and Sarah's hometown is recorded in the history not as "Valley," as in this manuscript, but as "W. Whiteland, Pa.," some seventeen miles from present-day Valley Township. The second and more interesting is that the last two names in Anna's register, along with their register numbers, are absent from A Brief History, which in both its 1872 and 1884 editions skips directly from number 252 to number 255.
Westtown was founded by the Philadelphia Religious Society of Friends in order to educate their children in "an environment that fostered moral development." The school's original 600 acres were purchased in 1794, when they were a full day's drive distant from Philadelphia. Although over the years Westtown relaxed its admission policies to include non-Quaker students, it remains "the oldest continuously operating coeducational boarding school in the United States" ("Westtown School records"). In its early days, students-both boys and girls-studied such practical subjects as reading, penmanship, bookkeeping, and geography, as well as mathematics and natural sciences. While boys also learned surveying, girls focused on sewing, and two embroidery samples done by Anna's sister at Westtown are held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
REFERENCES: A Brief History of Westtown Boarding School with a General Catalogue of Occers, Students, etc. (Philadelphia, PA, 1872 and 1884); "History," on westtown.edu; "Westtown School records," on Philadelphia Area Archives Research Portal.
CONDITION: Good. Covers heavily foxed and medium wear to edges. (Inventory #: 7232)