I don’t care if we only pay our way for a time, if we can ultimately have a school that will be appreciated. –Frances Wood, c. 1853
“I saw that they admitted people before high-school graduation, and that it was far away from home,” recalls Groth. “I didn’t know anything about the Great Books.” She applied in the fall, was promptly accepted and slated to start in February 1971. “My father was a little dubious about this place. What if it was a funny farm? He drove me across the country, thinking that he might have to drag me back home. The first thing when we arrived on campus, a long-haired guy jumped out of the bushes flapping his arms like a bird.” Her father left her there anyway.
Frontier it was; the railroad ended at Janesville, Wisconsin, and the young women spent two full days traveling the last 90 miles by horse-drawn wagon. They spent much of the time stuck in apparently bottomless mud. On May 11, three days after their arrival in Mount Carroll, they began classes with 11 pupils in the Presbyterian church.
The atmosphere this morning is at once informal and serious. We’re going through a dozen pages of a book called Godel’s Proof. In a landmark 1931 article, Kurt Godel demolished the quest for perfect certainty in mathematics by proving that no logical system of axioms and proofs can be both consistent and complete.
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Austerity did not make Wood and Gregory compromise what were, for the 1850s, some fairly radical principles. The seminary’s first publication stated flatly, “As we claim the female mind is susceptible of the same cultivation as the male, and that there is equal demand for it, the same graduating course is prescribed for both. . . . The time devoted to each study is not specified as students will be advanced from class to class according to their progress.”
This egalitarianism and flexibility apparently didn’t hurt enrollment, because the seminary was in the midst of another physical expansion when the financial panic of 1857 brought all construction to a halt. In order to get the unfinished additional rooms in shape for the looming fall term, “Miss Wood did the work of two men, helped handle brick, laid floors, bought glass, paint and paper at wholesale, glazed forty windows, painted the building inside and the trim, except for the cornice, outside. She also papered and repainted most of the rooms in the main building. When the opening day arrived all was ready.”
