WOMAN IN ART
tually to the establishment of female seminaries aided by state appropriations. The hopes of legislative aid did not materialize, however, and in 1821 Mrs. Willard removed her Seminary to Troy, New York. By tax and subscription, four thousand dollars were raised by that city, and a suitable building erected, sixty by forty feet, three stories and a basement. The growth of the school in after years made it necessary, at two different periods, to erect additions, until the building was some three hundred feet long, facing a park of old elms and maples.
In 1825 Mrs. Willard lost her husband. In 1830-31 she was in Europe, and on her return entered into a scheme for educating a company of Greek girls for teachers in Athens. The sum of $2500 was raised for the purpose, $1100 being the profits on the sale of "Mrs. Willard's Journal and Letters" written and published for that charity.
In 1838 she resigned the Seminary to her son and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. John H. Willard. Suitable school works were a minus quantity in those days, and the energetic pioneer in the educational world wrote the first geography, and the first history of the United States, to meet that need in 1825, which she enlarged in 1852, and published at that date a volume of poems. In 1838 her output was "A Universal History in Perspective," and in 1844 a work "On the Circulation of the Blood." "A Chronographer of English History," 1845; "Chronographer of Ancient History," 1847; "Respiration and Its Effects," also "Last Leaves of American History," 1849; and "Astronomical Geography" and "Morals for the Young," in 1857.
When relieved of the arduous strain and responsibility of the Seminary, Mrs. Willard assisted in forming a number of schools for training teachers, normal schools they were; and hundreds of miles she drove in many states, with her messages of encouragement and helpfulness to small schools or groups of young teachers, whose letters had plied her with anxious and eager questions.
This indefatigable worker for the higher education of woman lived to see the Seminary she founded complete its fiftieth year of world-wide influence, and passed to the higher spiritual life from within its walls, at the age of eighty-three years.
She was the foremost instigator and influence for the higher education of womanhood. In that first fifty years of her Seminary, it was estimated that more than fifteen thousand young women were enrolled, a large majority of whom became teachers and directors, who carried the influence of the
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