A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPELMAN COLLEGE

Reported As Spelman's First Graduating Class

1881

• Founded as Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles
• School opens April 11 in basement of Friendship Baptist Church, the Rev. Frank Quarles, pastor

1882

• Two more teachers commissioned by the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society join Packard and Giles in "basement school"
• Packard and Giles introduced to John D. Rockefeller who pledges $250 to the school

1883

• Moved to present site occupying nine acres and five frame buildings
• "Model School" to train student-teachers opens

1884

• Name changes to Spelman Seminary in honor of Mrs. Laura Spelman Rockefeller and her parents Harvey Buel and Lucy Henry Spelman, longtime activists in the antislavery movement.

1885

• Spelman students print first issue of the Spelman Messenger
• Sophia Jones, M.D., first black female to join the faculty

1886

• Rockefeller Hall dedicated
• Nurse training department begins

1887

• First Spelman class graduates receiving high school diplomas

1888

• Packard Hall dedicated
• Spelman incorporated under Board of Trustees
• Charter granted by state of Georgia
• Henry L. Morehouse becomes first president of Board of Trustees..
  
  Read More: https://www.spelman.edu/about-us/history-in-brief

     Because Atlanta would not open a black public high school until 1924, the first generation of Spelman students enrolled in courses equivalent to high school instruction. In 1887, Spelman awarded its first diplomas at this level. Two women received the school’s first baccalaureate degrees in 1901.
     In Spelman’s first decades, a series of notoriously strict presidents, all friends of the Rockefeller family from the Northeast, required students to adhere to the standards of   Victorian-era feminine propriety. Women wore hats and gloves in public, and they needed special written permission to travel off campus.  Under the title “domestic training,” they learned domestic skills such as sewing, cooking, and laundry work. Two of the school’s founders, Harriet Giles and Sophia Packard,

believed that former slaves lacked correct work habits, so they demanded that Spelman students rise at four thirty each morning to wash and iron their clothes, a practice that continued into the 1920s.
      Spelman’s curriculum focused heavily on teacher training, although the school also initiated a nursing program in 1886 ...

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Read More: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/spelman-college-1881/ 

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