"The higher education of girls is of doubtful utility to the race." -Massachusetts educator W.R. Butler, 1896
In 1871, Marcel Proust was a baby in the Third Republic. Alexander Graham Bell was working to patent the telephone. The Civil War had led to the demise of almost all of the elite academies and colleges of Arkansas. But during Reconstruction, the state was making some progress in education.
The combined efforts of the American Missionary Association, Quaker missionaries from Indiana, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Freedmen themselves had by 1868 led to the creation of 27 Bureau-sponsored schools for African American men, women, and children, as well as 24 Sabbath schools and two high schools sponsored by the AMA and the Quakers. By one estimate, 40,000 formerly enslaved people learned to read and write in the Black schools of the late 1860s.
In 1868, the state began its effort to establish a system of public schools, complete with teacher licensure, administrative districts and superintendents, a state superintendent, and a professional association: the whole parasitical apparatus. By 1870, according to Michael Dougan's entry on elementary and secondary education in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, 88,585 white children and 19,280 Black children attended public schools.
The same year--1871--that the Arkansas General Assembly authorized a board of trustees to find a site for a land-grant university, some of Arkansas' leading men incorporated the State Female College at Little Rock, which would be called the Arkansas Female College by the time it opened in 1874 in Albert Pike's Greek Revival mansion at Seventh and Rock streets.
Myra Cornelia McAlmont first came south from Hornell, N.Y., in the early 1850s with her brother John Josephus McAlmont. She started a school at Benton, returned to Hornell, married Truman Warner, and returned to Arkansas with her daughter Julia McAlmont Warner. (The McAlmont community east of Sherwood in Pulaski County is named for the site on the Old Military Road where the family lived during the Civil War.)
With $40,000 raised and the Pike mansion leased from Albert Pike's daughter, the Arkansas Female College opened its first session on Oct. 5, 1874, with about 70 students. Levin M. Lewis, a former Confederate general, was president of the school (and by 1876 at least, professor of German and metaphysics); Myra Warner was principal (and by 1876, professor of mathematics and French).
The school enjoyed the support of three Arkansas conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church. I do wonder if the Brooks-Baxter War earlier in 1874 affected the school's efforts at recruitment. Whatever the background of General Lewis, there is not a whiff of the Lost Cause in any of the materials in the school's collection at the Arkansas State Archives.
Catalogs, circulars, invitations, programs, and a school newspaper reveal only that the school's leaders and alumnae were high-minded women dedicated to the liberal arts and well connected to the intellectual life of the rest of the country.
The earliest catalog for the Arkansas Female College in the collection at the State Archives is for 1876-1877. The reasons it gives for the selection of Little Rock as the school's site should give us something to strive for:
"Its beautiful situation [is] on the south bank of the Arkansas River, in one of the most healthful and salubrious portions of our Great West. Here the winters are short and mild, the summers long and delightful. The city is beautifully adorned in handsome residences, embowered in flowers of all varieties, from the tiniest snow-drop to the majestic and attractive magnolia ... The refinement of its citizens, its many social and religious advantages, afford students rare opportunities for the refinement of manners."
It's public relations, yes, but 150 years later, it could all be true. We just need to make a few edits. Tear up all the parking lots, plant some trees, and our summers might become delightful again. Enforce strict speed limits and laws against petty crimes and vagrancy, and we might have a cultural flowering. Civilized people might venture into the streets.
"Under the supervision of the President and his wife, the recreations are often extended by walks into the suburbs and other parts of the city," the 1876-77 catalog advertises after its bit on the grounds of the college, which is applicable now in spite of at least 20 years of neglect by the City of Little Rock:
"Here all healthful outdoor amusements may be enjoyed, under the shade of beautiful forest trees, interspersed with flowers and shrubs of rare beauty and fragrance."
The Arkansas Female College advertised itself on the reputation of its students as well as its teachers. The catalog published the names of alumnae. Daisy Cantrell was the first graduate; she matriculated at age 16 in 1874 and in 1875 took an A.M. (Artium Magister, Anglicized and feminized in this case to Mistress of Arts).
The A.M. was the highest degree that the AFC offered; it required proficiency in Greek or Latin and in a modern language, so Daisy must have enjoyed a good education prior to her enrollment at the AFC.
The AFC offered a two-year primary course (reading, writing, and arithmetic--note the very young girls in the accompanying photo), a four-year preparatory course, and a four-year collegiate course, which led to the A.M. or the slightly watered-down M.E.L., Mistress of English Letters, meaning one had opted out of the classical and foreign language requirements.
Completion of a master's degree (allowing one to teach) by age 16 or 17 was unusual in the 19th century. Decades of social promotion and factory-made curricula have led us to believe that anyone ready for college-level academic work by age 12 or so must be really smart. Not so.
But Julia McAlmont Warner must have been something. She matriculated in the first class at the Arkansas Female College at 14, and by 17 was a graduate and a teacher there. We'll look into her life and work soon.
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Morbid note: Watch out for online obituary aggregators. I suppose that many of the readers of this column are interested in genealogy (for which obituaries are indispensable), and know at least one or two have an interest in the flower business. Only trust obituaries published by a newspaper or a funeral home. Aggregator sites such as legacy.com scan the Web for obituaries to republish (thus drawing traffic to their websites and collecting donations/a portion of sales for flowers).
Because many obituaries are copyrighted, the aggregator sites use artificial intelligence to rewrite them, and the result is often nonsense (names of pets become names of children) or misinformation (false times and locations are given for visitations and funerals). This is a dark example of the way modern conveniences require us to be on guard to protect our very humanity.