Glenwood Seminary and Brattleborough Academy / Mary Wilkins Freeman

Glenwood Ladies’ Seminary opened in September 1860, with Hiram Orcutt as founder and principal. It was among the 19th-century examples of private secondary boarding schools for females in Vermont. The course of study included Composition, Logic, Intellectual Philosophy, Music, Oil Painting, and much more. Its first class had 128 students from nine states plus Constantinople. An East Hall dormitory was erected in 1863 to join the Chapel and West Hall leased from the former Brattleborough Academy, which began in 1801 to prepare young men for college. By 1876, the ladies’ seminary was replaced by the co-educational Glenwood Classical Seminary. In 1901, the Chapel became the public Academy School, open until 1957. American writer Mary Wilkins Freeman was born in 1852 in Randolph, Massachusetts. Her family moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1867. Studying for one year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Freeman would complete her formal education at Glenwood Ladies Seminary in 1873. Returning to Randolph in 1883, she became a very successful author respected by the likes of Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Her years in Brattleboro influenced her development as a writer of New England life. Freeman is best known for A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), Pembroke (1894), and The Debtor (1905). In 1926 she became the first honoree of the William Dean Howells Medal for fiction. Freeman died in 1930.