1855 – A letter from the principal of the Fort Plain Seminary and Female Collegiate Institute written on the back cover of the school’s informational brochure offering part-time employment as a music teacher

Fort Plain, New York, 1855. Envelope or Cover. Very good. This letter is written on the back cover of a three-page brochure advertising the Fort Plain Seminary and Female Collegiate Institute. It was sent by the Reverend James E. Latimer, the school principal, from Fort Plain, New York to Mr. J. Waters in West Sutton, Massachusetts. The 8¼” x 10½” brochure is enclosed in an institutional advertising envelope with both “Paid” annotations that bears a circular Fort Plains postmark. The first page of the brochure features a large illustration of the school. In nice shape.

Latimer’s letter notes that a teacher at the school had informed him that (truncated) Waters recently applied for a music teacher position at an institution in Charlotteville (a small community near Cooperstown). He further enquiries if Waters would be interested in accepting a part-time position teaching music for two hours per day at his institution.
The Fort Plain Seminary and Female Collegiate Institute was a coed boarding school that accommodated 300 students and 16 faculty members. It opened in 1853, and as described in this brochure offered five different programs.

Its “Academic Department’s” general education course was attended by “both Ladies and Gentlemen”

The “Collegiate” program was “for Ladies alone” who could enroll in its “Eclectic Course,” a program to prepare “young ladies” for teaching, “Belles Letters,” where women studied French, Natural Sciences, and Mathematics, and the “Classics,” which included Latin as well as Belles Letters courses. Ornamental courses like painting, drawing, and flower work were available and music lessons were provided using ten pianos and “an outfit of Guitars and Melodeons.” Weekly rhetorical exercises, declamations, and/or compositions were required of all students.

Tuition varied by program, ranging from $2.20 to $5.50 per 11-week quarter with music, drawing, and painting, flower work, and penmanship requiring additional fees. Room, washing, and board was charged at $1.62½ per week with an additional firewood fee during colder months. . The Fort Plain curriculum refutes the canard that schooling for young women was less rigorous than for young men. While that may have been the case up to the very early 1800s, by the 1850s advanced female education had achieved parity with advanced male education in terms of academic rigor, availability, and access. Of the 6,000 academies and seminaries operating circa 1850, half were for young women and half were for young men, and coeducational higher education began at Oberlin College in 1837. The big difference was in how that education was used; most male graduates became ministers while most female graduates became teachers or used what they had learned to, in turn, educate their own children.

(For more information about 19th century women’s education, see Sweet’s "The Female Seminary Movement and Woman's Mission in Antebellum America" in the March, 1985 issue of Church History, available through JSTOR and Horowitz’s Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s.) . (Inventory #: 010423)