Marietta and Emily Ingham founded the Le Roy Female Seminary in Le Roy, New York. The curriculum was influenced by that at the Mount Holyoke seminary, and by 1851, the seminary, overseen by the Presbyterian Synod of Genesee, had 230 pupils in two academic divisions: the non-graded secondary-level seminary and the primary (preparatory) department.
Lydia Booth, the daughter of Matthew Vassar’s sister, Maria, and George Booth, moved her female seminary from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to Poughkeepsie. The school was for many years located in a building on Garden Street owned by Matthew Vassar and was known as Cottage Hill Seminary.
“The force of circumstances brought me occasionaly in buisness entercourse with my Niece, which will account for the early direction of my mind for the enlarged Education of Women and the subsequent drift of enquiries in my conversation & correspondence with gentlemen Educators in this Country and a few in Europe….”
Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, ed., Autobiography and Letters of Matthew Vassar