Site of Andrew Female College

🏛️The era

In the early 1850s, Texas was a young state, and higher education, especially for women, was scarce. Most colleges admitted only men, and girls who wanted more than basic schooling often had very few options. Churches stepped in to fill the gap, founding academies and colleges across the South to educate young people of both sexes, though usually in separate institutions.

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which sponsored Andrew Female College, had itself been formed in the mid-1840s after the national Methodist church split along regional lines over slavery. Bishop James Osgood Andrew, for whom the college was named, was a central figure in that split.

The college lived through dramatic decades: the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1867 that struck communities across Texas. By the 1870s, education itself was changing, as public schools and state institutions began opening their doors to women.

👥People & events

Andrew Female College was founded in 1852 and chartered early in 1853. Although it was sponsored by the Methodist church, its charter allowed no religious tests for faculty or students, a notably open policy for the time. Its first five-month session began in May 1853 in an old Huntsville College building known as "The Brick Academy."

The demand was immediate. Enrollment ran so high that classes quickly outgrew the academy, and the citizens of Huntsville raised money for a larger, two-story building, finished in 1855. By the 1856-1857 school year, eighty students were enrolled, mostly from Walker County and its neighbors. They studied a classical curriculum along with moral instruction, music, drawing, painting, and embroidery.

The college kept running straight through the Civil War. But in 1867, yellow fever swept through, taking the life of the college president, several faculty members, and a number of students. The fall term was postponed until the first frost killed the mosquitoes that spread the disease.

In the end, progress outpaced the college. As institutions such as Sam Houston Normal Institute began admitting women, enrollment declined after 1872, and the school closed in 1880. Its property went to the city of Huntsville and reopened that same year as the town's first public school. Later, the building was moved and became a public school for African American children.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Andrew Female College belongs to a broad American movement in the nineteenth century to give women serious education. Female academies and colleges, many church-sponsored, trained generations of women who became teachers, community leaders, and advocates. They helped prove that women could master the same classical subjects as men.

The college's decline is part of that same story. As public education expanded and coeducational institutions opened to women, many small private female colleges lost students and closed. Their passing was, in a sense, a sign of success: the opportunities they had fought for were becoming more widely available.

The building's afterlife also mirrors the history of public schooling in the South, from the arrival of free public schools to the segregated system that served Black and white children separately. One structure carried the community through each of those chapters.

🧭If you visit

Stand at the marker and picture the town in 1853, when students first gathered at the old Brick Academy, and then the excitement of moving into a new two-story building funded by Huntsville's own residents. The site is a reminder of how much a community invested in its daughters' education.

Huntsville is a rewarding town for history lovers, with a deep connection to early Texas and a long tradition as a center of education. This marker fits naturally into a walking or driving tour of its historic sites.

As you travel on, think about the many layers here: a women's college, a town's first public school, and a school for African American children. Few single sites tell the story of American education across so many decades.