04/11/1881 AD founded
The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary is established in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA, by two teachers from the Oread Institute of Worcester, MA: Harriet E. Giles and Sophia B. Packard.
Giles and Packard had met while Giles was a student, and Packard the preceptress, of the New Salem Academy in New Salem, MA, and fostered a lifelong friendship there.
The two of them traveled to Atlanta specifically to found a school for black freedwomen, and found support from Frank Quarles, the pastor of Friendship Baptist Church.
Giles and Packard began the school with 11 African-American women and $100 given to them by the First Baptist Church in Medford, MA, and a promise of further support from the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society (WABHMS), a group with which they were both affiliated in Boston.
Although their first students were mostly illiterate, they envisioned their school to be a liberal arts institution – the first circular of the college stated that they planned to offer "algebra, physiology, essays, Latin, rhetoric, geometry, political economy, mental philosophy (psychology), chemistry, botany, Constitution of the United States, astronomy, zoology, geology, moral philosophy, and evidences of Christianity".
Over time, they attracted more students; by the time the first term ended, they had enrolled 80 students in the seminary. The WABHMS made a down payment on a nine-acre (36,000 m2) site in Atlanta relatively close to the church they began in, which originally had five buildings left from a Union Civil War encampment, to support classroom and residence hall needs.
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