Emma (Hart) Willard (1787 - 1870)

Born 23 Feb 1787 in Berlin, Hartford County, Connecticut, United States

Ancestors

Wife of John Willard II — married Aug 1809 in Middlebury, Addison County, Vermont, United States

Wife of Christoffer C. Yates — married 17 Sep 1838 (to about 1839) in Troy, Rensselaer, New York, United States

Descendants

Died 15 Apr 1870 at age 83 in Troy, Rensselaer County, New York, United States

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Biography

Emma (Hart) Willard is Notable.

Emma (Hart) Willard was an American educator who dedicated her life to women's higher education. She established and conducted the famous Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, which is considered the first U.S. collegiate-level educational institution for women. She wrote geography and history textbooks that were widely used in schools at the time and trained and influenced hundreds of teachers.^[1]

Emma Hart was born February 23, 1787 in Berlin, Hartford County, Connecticut, United States. She was a daughter of Samuel Hart (a Revolutionary War hero) and Lydia (Hinsdale) Hart.^[2] She was the 16th of her father's 17 children by his two wives.^[3] Her early education in local common schools was supplemented by her own efforts to teach herself topics including geometry and astronomy, apparently with the support and help of her father.^[4][5]

Emma started teaching at the age of 16 or 17 when she was hired as a teacher in a local village school. During about three years of local teaching, she developed effective approaches to teaching and took advantage of opportunities to advance her own learning at academies in Hartford.^[6] In early 1807 she accepted a position at an academy in Westfield, Massachusetts, and later that summer went from Westfield to Middlebury, Vermont, where she became preceptress of a well-regarded "female academy" there that had closed due to the illness of its previous teacher.^[7][8]

After two years of conducting the Middlebury school, she was married in August 1809 to Doctor John Willard of Middlebury, Marshal of the State of Vermont. He was 28 years older than Emma. They had one child together, son John Hart Willard, born in 1810.^[1][9] Her husband appreciated and encouraged her intellectual pursuits, and in his household, she enjoyed access to his extensive library, allowing her to read on topics such as mathematics, philosophy, and medicine. A nephew of her husband's was a student at Middlebury College, and observation of his experiences gave her a view of the opportunities that young men had in colleges that were not open to women. For a time after her marriage and the birth of her son, Emma did not teach, focusing her days on management of the household and farm. However, her husband encountered financial difficulties around the time of the War of 1812, and to help with the family finances in 1814 she resumed her educational work by starting the Middlebury Female Seminary, a boarding school for young women in their Middlebury, Vermont, home. ^[10][11]

At Middlebury, she was unsuccessful in her efforts to get Middlebury College to allow women to sit in on classes as listeners, but in her Middlebury Female Seminary, she expanded beyond the traditional female curriculum to include instruction in subject matter such as mathematics. During these years, she wrote and disseminated "A Plan for Improving Female Education" in which she advocated for more advanced study opportunities women "for the sake of the Republic." The "Plan" was endorsed by prominent national political figures, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and New York Governor DeWitt Clinton. Governor Van Ness of Vermont took notice of the "Plan" and suggested that she could go to Burlington and open a female seminary in college buildings there, but nothing more resulted from his suggestion. New York Governor Clinton took interest in the "Plan" and invited the Willards to Albany to present her plan to the state's legislature. The New York legislature authorized her to create an academy and provided funding from a fund previously limited to boys' schools, but did not endow the academy. With their support, in 1819 Emma Willard moved her school and her family to Waterford, New York,^[12][13] where the school became "the Academy for Female Education." The school operated in Waterford for about two years, relocating to Troy, New York, in May 1821 in response to a generous invitation from the citizens of Troy, who offered a building and grounds to house and expand the school.^[14]

Textbooks used at Troy Female Seminary by 1822 included then-standard works on rhetoric, logic, moral and intellectual philosophy, algebra, geometry, and Latin. French and Spanish languages were introduced a little later. Emma saw a need for better textbooks in some fields, so she took it upon herself to create her own. In 1822 she collaborated with William Chauncey Woodbridge in writing "Woodbridge's and Willard's Geography," which was widely used. Later she added history texts, including "Republic of America" (1828), of which Daniel Webster wrote to the author, "I keep it near me as a book of reference, accurate in facts and dates;" "Willard's Universal History," prepared with the help of a former pupil, Miranda (Aldis) Kellogg; "Historical Guide," and "Temple of Time."^[15] Her publications also included titles in astronomy and other topics. Total sales of books were about a million copies at the time of her death. Her most original contribution to science was a "Treatise on the Motive powers which produce the Circulation of Blood" (1846).

Family members supported her work. Her sister Almira (Hart) Lincoln joined her at Troy Female Seminary in 1824, becoming vice-principal of the school.^[15] Emma's husband John Willard was her strong supporter until his death in May 1825.

On 17 September 1838 Emma married Dr. Christopher C. Yates, an Albany physician, in the chapel of the Troy Female Seminary of which she was the preceptor. ^[16] Some biographies of Emma Willard describe the marriage as a disaster and some others do not even mention it. The couple separated nine months later,^[17] and they were divorced in 1843.

She died April 15, 1870 in Troy, Rensselaer County, New York, United States. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

Legacy

The Troy Female Seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School in the 1890s. It still operates under that name.

Inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx, New York, in 1905.

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} Collection Overview, Emma Hart Willard Family Papers, Collection MA.00140, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/144
2. ↑ https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/willard-emma-hart-1787-1870
3. ↑ Andrews, Alfred. Genealogical history_of Deacon Stephen Hart and_his descendants. (The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., New Britain, Conn. 1875) , page 56.
4. ↑ Gilchrist, page 242.
5. ↑ Parton, pages 275-276
6. ↑ Parton, page 276.
7. ↑ Gilchrist, pages 242-243.
8. ↑ Parton, pages 276-277.
9. ↑ On page 56 of the Hart genealogy, Andrews indicates that Dr. Willard and Emma married in 1812, which is wrong. Page 77 of that book gives 1809 as the date of their marriage.
10. ↑ Fairbanks et al., pages 12-13.
11. ↑ Gilchrist, page 243-244.
12. ↑ Gilchrist, page 244.
13. ↑ Fairbanks et al., page 13.
14. ↑ Parton, page 280.
15. ↑ ^{15.0 15.1} Fairbanks, et al., page 16.
16. ↑ Bowman, Fred Q. 10,000 Vital Records of Western New York, 1809-1850. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1985, page 258. Accessed on Ancestry.com at https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/10057:61445
17. ↑ "Emma Willard Biography – Facts, Birthday, Life Story – Biography." Famous Biographies & TV Shows – Biography.com. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20180323111431/https://www.biography.com/people/emma-willard-9531676 on 23 March 2018

• Wikipedia: Emma Willard
• Andrews, H.C. & Hinsdale, S.C. Hinsdale Genealogy: Descendants of Robert Hinsdale (Alfred Hinsdale Andrews. Lombard, Illinois, 1906) Page 130
• "Willard: Inventor of the Modern Woman (in 1821)," New England Historical Society, published online on https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com, updated 2022.
• Fairbanks, Mary Mason, ed., Mary A. Hastings, Henry L. Palmer. Emma Willard and her pupils, or, Fifty years of Troy Female Seminary; 1822-1872. Alma Sage, publisher. 1898. Accessed at https://id.lib.harvard.edu/curiosity/women-working-1800-1930/45-990026368760203941 and https://archive.org/details/cu31924030634921
• Gilchrist, Beth Bradford. "Emma Willard". In Vermonters : a book of biographies. Brattleboro Vt.: S. Daye Press, 1931. Pages 242-245. Accessed on Ancestry.com at https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/23149/images/dvm_LocHist008893-00122-0
• Lord, John. The Life of Emma Willard (Applewood’s Education Series, 1873)
• Parton, James. Eminent Women of the Age (S. M. Betts & Co., Hartford, Conn., 1868) Page 273-86
• Southern Literary Messenger 12 (July 1846): 453-465
• Willard, Emma. "A Plan for Improving Female Education," 2nd edition. Middlebury, Vermont: J.W. Copeland, 1819. https://books.google.com/books?id=T9s2AAAAMAAJ
• Harvard University Library Open Collections Program
• Find A Grave: Memorial #1106