Carbondale, Wenona, Belleville. One writer speaks of ten or fifteen academies in northern Illinois. There were seminaries for young ladies at Monticello, Godfrey, Rockford, Jacksonville, Du Quoin, Granville, Washington, Carlinville, Galesburg, Canton and Marshall. The young ladies' seminary at Rockford has been perhaps the most prosperous and successful of these. At a general convention of the congregational churches of the northwest, held in Cleveland, Ohio, in June, 1844, a resolution was adopted that "the exigencies of Wisconsin and northern Illinois require that those sections should unite in establishing a college and a female seminary of the highest order, one in Wisconsin, near to Illinois and the other in Illinois, near to Wisconsin. From the first it was believed that the college should be at Beloit. In 1845, after four conventions held at Beloit, a board of trustees was elected to care for both institutions. Rockford raised $3,500 for the Seminary and the trustees voted to locate it in that town. On February 25, 1847, a charter was granted to the incorporators. Aratus Kent was named first here as among the trustees. Flavel Bascom of the "Yale Band" was also one of the number. Of the sixteen incorporators eight were clergymen. The same men were the incorporators of Beloit College. In expectation of the opening of the Seminary, Rev. L. H. Loss, then pastor of the First Congregational Church, invited Miss Anna Peck Sill, of the Cary Collegiate Institute in Genesee county, New York, to come to Rockford and open a school, preparatory to the proposed Seminary. This was just the opportunity she desired for a life of missionary and educational service, for which she was fitted by the best preparation New York then afforded. She opened her school in 1849 in Rockford with seventy pupils. In 1851, her school was formally recognized by the trustees of Beloit College as the preparatory department of Rockford Female Seminary, whose charter had already been obtained. This charter granted full collegiate powers though the institution retained the name Seminary untill 1892. Fifteen were admitted in this year 1851 to the Seminary to constitute its first class of whom seven graduated in 1854. Miss Sill continued the leadership of the school for thirty-five years, and raised much money for it in the east. She is said to have been a woman of wonderful endowment of head and heart and possessed also of indomitable will. In 1852, the Seminary passed into the control of a separate board of trustees although for many years certain men were on the boards of Beloit and Rockford.1 Linked thus to Beloit in its beginnings, we see how the pioneer ministers of Illinois did not limit their eduational interest to Illinois. Beloit College in Wisconsin and Iowa College at Grinnell, in Iowa, owed their foundation to Illinois home missionaries. With untiring effort, the New England missionaries and their friends fostered, cherished, promoted the interest in free public schools until they were well established. They first suggested careful and efficient 1 Church, History of Rockford, 287-295. supervision of schools; they felt the need of special education for teachers, and from their ranks, came the man who first gave tangible shape to the desire for industrial education. In the field of moral achievement within a social unit like a state, it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the influences which emanate from any group of people, such as the settlers from New England in Illinois; or from their institutions, such as the church. We can, however, recount the moral issues that were in men's minds during a given period and find the attitude of different classes of society toward these issues. The history of later years will show where a compromise of conflicting opinion has occurred or where one set of opinions has triumphed in social action. Public opinion of today does not view certain matters, as for example, Catholicism, in the same light as did the New Englanders in Illinois forty or fifty years ago; but in many directions we must acknowledge the exceeding excellence of their ideas and ideals. They stood for order, thrift, economy and enterprise. They encouraged the formation and expression of public opinion. They looked with intelligence beyond their own communities to the welfare of state and nation. They valued personal integrity above all things. To foster this, churches with all their allied organizations were multiplied east and west, north and south. But integrity must be informed, broadened, and so there must be education, colleges for leaders, common schools and industrial education for all the people. Who may say that these influences of the past have not already conditioned the present Illinois whose true greatness is measured alone by the enlightened integrity of her people. |