Site of Andrew Female College
Huntsville, Walker County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Site of Andrew Female College; Established and chartered in 1853; An influential early Texas college for women founded by the Methodist Church; Named for Bishop James Osgood Andrew; Closed after about 26 years of service
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Chartered in 1853 and named for Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, Andrew Female College was one of the earliest institutions of higher learning for women in Texas. Founded by the Methodist Church in Huntsville, it educated young women for roughly a quarter century before closing. Only the site remains to mark its work.
Why it matters
The college stands for the pioneering effort to offer women formal higher education in mid-nineteenth-century Texas, decades before it became widely available.
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Related people
- · James Osgood Andrew
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Andrew Female College
Huntsville, TX
Andrew Female College was founded in 1852 and chartered in 1853, sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, though its charter barred religious tests. At a time of scarce schooling for women, it opened in Huntsville's old "Brick Academy" and soon needed a larger building, teaching a classical curriculum alongside music, drawing, and painting. It survived the Civil War and an 1867 yellow fever epidemic that killed its president and others, but declining enrollment closed it in 1880, after which the property became Huntsville's first public school and later a school for African American children.
Ball, The Rev. Thomas H.
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Thomas Henry Ball was a Virginia-born Methodist minister who followed his father into the pulpit before answering a call to teach in frontier Texas. Arriving in Huntsville in 1855, he joined the faculty of Andrew Female College — one of the state's earliest institutions for the education of young women, founded by the Methodist Church in 1852 — and rose to serve as both professor and president until typhoid fever took his life in 1858. His story braids together the antebellum South's twin engines of church and school.
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Founded in 1888 when coeducation was still uncommon, this college rose from funds raised by the citizens of Willis, who erected a two-and-a-half-story building for it. Local taxes covered three months of schooling a year, with modest tuition funding the rest, and it drew boarding students from a wide area. After passing through several owners, the campus was sold to the city in 1901 to serve as its public school.
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