October 1, 1866

Preparing the education section of her The College, The Market, and the Court: or Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor and Law (1868) the Boston feminist writer and Unitarian preacher Caroline Wells Healy Dall closely studied Oberlin, Antioch and Vassar, which she visited in October 1866. “It was pleasant,” she reported, “to see four hundred young women of the highest health, the best breeding, of good social standing, and abundant means, blossoming like so many tulips at Vassar,—we must add, also, of good ability, and more than average education; for only good scholars could pass the rigid examination required of those who enter. It was plasant to see that between between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, when society offers its greatest allurements, four hundred wealthy girls could be found, ready to devote themselves in seclusion…to higher things.”

Impressed by Vassar’s Main Building and by the reputation and qualities of the three principle women on the original faculty—Maria Mitchell, Alida Avery and Elizabeth Powell—and of the lady principal, Hannah Lyman, Dall also noted, “besides these women, Vassar employs twenty others, in whom, it would be hard to find a fault.” Dall’s assesment of the founder, with whom she spoke at length, was equally high:

“Could you see him meet the scholars in the grounds, you would think them all his children. I had interviews with the president, trustees, and the teachers; but was most attracted to this noble old man. Matthew Vassar’s “last gift to the college,” she observed, was the exceptionally complete Mineralogical and Geological Cabinet, over 4000 specimins purchased from the eminent collector Henry Augustua Ward and installed by Ward next the the Art Gallery in the top floor of the Main Building— a “magnificent cabinet of stones and rocks.”

“He told me, that he meant to go on endowing the college until he died. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘I shall leave nothing for the executors to quarrel about: money will be safe in brick and stone.’” In this particular, Dall’s prediction was only partly correct. Matthew Vassar died at a meeting of the trustees on June 23, 1868. There ensued no quarelling among the executors, but in his will he forgave a $75,000 loan he had provided to complete the college buildings and bequeathed $50,000 for a lecture fund, $50,000 for an auxiliary fund to aid students of superior promise $50,000 for a library, art and cabinet fund and the residue of his estate, amounting to about $125,000, for a repair fund.

Caroline Wells Healy Dall, The College, The Market, and the Court: or Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law