Amanda's school daze

I have a letter written in 1984 about our family history from a member of the Moranda* branch. In this letter the writer says that Amanda Caroline went to college. Most of the information in this letter seems to depend on a couple of letters Basil Edmondson Newton wrote to his daughter Audrey in the 1920s.  But although Basil Edmondson Newton did write in one of those letters that his mother taught school later on in her life, this notion that she had gone to college was new to me.

I'm generally a little bit skeptical of family lore. But I thought I'd check out this statement, and it turns out to be true. The second school in Georgia that I emailed checked their records and reported back that both Amanda Caroline and her younger sister Harriet attended LaGrange Female College in 1853 and graduated in 1854.

From the 1855 catalogue, courtesy of LaGrange College Library.

LaGrange began as a school for girls, then was chartered by the state legislature in 1831 as LaGrange Female Academy. In 1847 it became LaGrange Female Institute, and the legislature gave it the authority to grant degrees. In 1851 it became LaGrange Female College. Most early colleges in the US were organized by religious denominations, and LaGrange was not an exception. It had always been run by Methodist clergy, and after 1857 it was under the jurisdiction of the North Georgia Methodist Conference, which it still is, as LaGrange College. It was founded remarkably early for a women's college, and it's said to be the oldest private college in Georgia.  

We don't know why James and Rebecca Edmondson decided to send their daughters to college. Being able to teach was considered a good way for a woman to earn a living in case her husband died or she never married.  And it certainly became useful for Amanda Caroline later on, as we shall see. Maybe  Rebecca and James were thinking of this. We also don't know what these young women learned, or who was teaching them. I'll try to do a bit more research about the college after Christmas and write about it then.



*The Morandas are our cousins, the descendants of Basil Edwin Newton's sister Nona Mae. So we share a set of great (or great-great, depending on your generation) grandparents, Nora Alice White and Basil Edmondson Newton. We used to know some of them, but we've kind of lost touch.