Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps (1793-1884)
MSA SC 3520-15243
Extended biography:
Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps had a profound influence on the world around her, challenging the limits and narrowly defined expectations of women at the time. Although largely forgotten and ignored, her work as a teacher and author had a significant impact on the world of education, particularly the education of women.
Born in Berlin, Connecticut, on July 15, 1793, Almira Hart was the youngest of seventeen children; her father, Samuel Hart, had seven children from his first marriage and ten from his second marriage to Almira’s mother, Lydia Hinsdale Hart. Growing up in Berlin, Almira experienced many of the stereotypical benefits of a youngest child, with hardly any of the detriments expected of a youngest in a large family. Her parents, fearing she would one day be left an orphan due to their advanced age, showered her with attention and affection, neglecting the stricter discipline with which they had ruled over her older siblings. Despite the fact that many older siblings had gone to school before her, her parents, with the help of a few older brothers, were able to afford to give her an education.
Phelps was interested in education and academics from an early age, delighting in the intellectual conversation that her family engaged in. Her father would often read aloud from any number of classics works, such as Paradise Lost. This intellectually stimulating home environment fostered her academic development. However, her education was not limited to the conversation and reading done at home with her family; when she became school aged she attended Berlin District School. The combination of formal schooling and a home environment conducive to curiosity led Phelps to be able to think for herself at a very young age.
In an 1834 article, Phelps recalled episodes from her childhood and wrote, “At twelve I was much what might have been expected of a child of strong and undisciplined passions; selfish, self-willed, and imperious.”1 However, she went on to say that an older sister intervened, wrote to her and pointed out her faults, then encouraged Almira to learn self-discipline. Phelps saw the benefit in her sister's advice and took it; she began profitable reading, as well as keeping a journal in order to “scrutinize [her] own conduct.”2 As she grew older, Phelps continued her education at the Berlin Academy, and later at her sister’s home in Middlebury, Vermont. Once her own formal education had been completed, she opened a small boarding school, operating it out of her father’s home. Shortly thereafter, Phelps fell in love with Simeon Lincoln, a Hartford newspaper editor, and on October 4, 1817, they married. Following their marriage, she left her career in teaching to focus her attention on keeping house and being a good wife and mother.
Phelps was attracted to Lincoln for his, “personal charm and their shared pleasure in literature.”3 In the evening they would often sit and spend time reading together. Sadly, the couple’s happy marriage was brief. In 1821 their first son died, before reaching the age of one. Two years later, in 1823, Phelps’ husband died after a sudden relapse of yellow fever. Left a widow, with two young daughters under the age of three, she was forced to seek employment to support her family.
Returning to her former profession, Phelps moved to Tory, New York to work with her older sister, Emma Willard, at the Troy Female Seminary. Willard found her to be a wonderful help, bringing both practicality and efficiency to her work. Phelps worked as a teacher at the Seminary, but eventually became vice-principal alongside her sister, and held the post for seven years.
Phelps’ time at Troy Seminary not only solidified her ability as an exceptional teacher and administrator, but it also influenced and developed her intellectual talent. She had only been at Troy for a short while before she became interested in the science courses offered for the students at the Seminary by Amos Eaton. This interest led her to more indepth study and the eventual writing of scientific textbooks. In 1828 she published her first, and most well known textbook, Familiar Lectures on Botany. It was received positively among scientists, teachers, and students. As Emma Bolzau, a biographer of Phelps, explained it, her “life at Troy Seminary…inspired her to write her science textbooks” and, “[u]nder her authorship textbooks appeared in every large field of science except astronomy.”4
In addition to the development of her scientific interests and work, it was at Troy Seminary that Phelps, “first formulated and put into writing her ideas on female education.”5 She became a strong proponent and advocate for women's education, and would later be described as a, “pioneer in the education of girls at the preparatory school level.”6 Her work at Troy Female Seminary set the stage for the rest of her career, particularly her important work at Patapsco Female Institute.
On August 17, 1831, Almira married John Phelps, a widower who she had met because two of his daughters attended Troy Seminary. For the first seven years after their marriage she did not hold any formal position, focusing her attention on their home and family. In spite of the lack of formal employment, Mrs. Phelps managed to keep herself occupied and productive. Even though she was primarily responsible for the workings of the home and care of several children (her own, plus some of her husband's from previous marriage), Phelps continued to write textbooks, revise previously published works, and edit manuscripts, as well as being an active member of their church and working to arrange several community organizations. During this period of time Phelps also gave birth to two more children, Charles Edward (1833) and Almira Lincoln (1836).
Then, in 1838, with her husband's approval, Phelps went back to work as an educator; she served as principal of two different schools in New England between 1838 and 1841. Despite her obvious talent for school administration, as seen in her work at Troy Seminary, due to a variety of issues she had only moderate success at these two schools.
In 1841, the Phelps’ received an invitation from the Episcopal Bishop of Maryland, asking them to come to Ellicott’s Mills (now Ellicott City), Maryland to head up a school for girls. The school had operated for a time under different management, but had been forced to close due to financial difficulties. In mutual agreement, the Phelps’ decided that it was a wonderful opportunity and relocated to Maryland. Phelps would become the principal of the school while her husband served as its business director.
Her work at the Patapsco Institute would prove to be, arguably, the most significant of Phelps’ career. Her time there has been described as, “her crowning work.”7 And it has been said that she viewed Patapsco as, “the place in which she might cap her life’s work.”8 With the position of principal given to her, she was allowed almost exclusive control over the development of the school granting her opportunity to create the curriculum, establish rules, and essentially mold the entire institution.
The Patapsco Female Institute officially re-opened, on November 12, 1841, under the management of the Phelps' in cooperation with the Episcopal diocese. Although the school had been relatively unsuccessful in the past, Phelps quickly turned it around, bringing attendance up to approximately one hundred girls per year. Many of the students came from homes in the South, and Phelps hoped through the school to aid in the preservation of the Union, which was at the time under significant stress. Not only did the number of students rise, Phelps also increased respect for the schools academic programs.
The curriculum Phelps established was tough and thorough, because she firmly believed that women were as capable of academic rigor as men. Her goal was to, “help young women find their way to an independent identity, whether they married or not, and to help them prepare for achievement.”9 Many of her students were enrolled at the Institute in order to train to become teachers. Patapsco, in fact, became a place of preparation for teachers, many years before the state of Maryland established normal schools for their training and certification.
In addition to their intellectual development, Phelps took a personal, motherly interest in the students’ moral development. Mrs. Phelps, “believed the purpose of education was to create an individual equipped to deal with whatever, in the providence of God, life should present,” whether that be intellectual or moral.10 She would regularly gather the students together, in order to, “give them motherly and friendly advice. Occasionally in place of a lecture she would read stories she had written.”11 She wrote the stories, which were eventually published as novels, for the purpose of moral instruction, hoping to capture the attention of her students, as well as providing wholesome fiction for young readers. Phelps believed that if she left her students, “equipped with the one indispensable prerequisite—a moral education” then they would be “prepared to fill any role in life.”12
After her husband’s death in 1848, Mrs. Phelps continued to work at the school for another eight years. Then, in 1856, Mrs. Phelps retired from her position as principal of Patapsco Female Institute, largely due to the sudden death of her daughter, Jane, in railway accident the year before. When she retired, Phelps had worked at Patapsco for fifteen years and built it up to be a thriving, well respected school for girls. Under her leadership, the Institute experienced, “its golden years of high enrollments, national attention and a flourishing connection with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.”13
After she left Patapsco, she moved to Eutaw Place, in Baltimore, Maryland. Despite the fact that she was retired, Almira Phelps did not decrease her level of social and intellectual activity. Her home became a social centre of the city, much like a European salon. As her horizon expanded beyond education, Mrs. Phelps continued to write, as well as frequently responding to “national events, like the Civil War and the suffrage struggle, as well as international ones, like the movement for Cuban independence.”14
In 1862, as the Civil War began to take hold over the country, Mrs. Phelps wrote to the governor of Maryland, Augustus Bradford, pleading on behalf of her son, Charles Edward. In the first letter, written on August 11, 1862, Mrs. Phelps told the governor of her sons consideration of a commission in the Maryland Service. Mrs. Phelps admitted that her son did not know of her writing to the governor, but felt compelled to plead that, should he enlist, he would be stationed in an area that would not expose him to “the malaria of southern swamps.”15 The second letter, written on August 12, 1862, just a day after the first, expressed regret at having ever written the first. Phelps was concerned that the governor would consider her “vacillating in purpose” but she could not bear to be, in any small way, “instrumental to his being called into a situation of danger.”16 She asked that Governor Bradford give her son “some civil or judicial office” suitable for “a man of his education and abilities,” that would not require him to leave Baltimore.17 As concerned as his mother was, Charles Edward decided to enlist, joining the 7th regiment of the Maryland Infantry on August 30, 1862.18 He later earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic service during the war.19
Following her son’s enlistment, Mrs. Phelps became an active participant in relief movements, working to ensure that the men fighting knew that those back home cared about and appreciated them. In the early 1860s, she was the editor of a project which compiled patriotic essays into a book. It was published in 1864, under the title Our Country in its Relations to the Past, Present, and Future, and was sold at the Maryland State Fair in Baltimore.20
Though a strong supporter of women’s education and women as participants in traditionally masculine fields, such as science, Mrs. Phelps was also strongly opposed to women having the right to vote. She was a member of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association for many years.21 One biographer even stated that, “Those who advocated the ballot crossed the line, in Phelps’ judgment, into absurdity.”22 Interestingly, the famous women’s suffrage advocate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was among the Troy Female Seminary students when Mrs. Phelps served as Vice-Principal.23
After twenty eight years of active retirement, following a full career, Mrs. Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps passed away on the morning of her 91st birthday. Her surviving children, who had lived with her at her Eutaw Place home, were with her at her deathbed.24 She died peacefully, and several sources describe her as having been in full possession of her faculties and abilities up until her death.25 Her death certificate cited the cause of death as “extreme age.”26 The obituary published in the New York Times, on July 16, 1884 ran the headline, “A Noted Teacher’s Death,” demonstrating that her name and legacy were well known by people around the nation.27
In her long career, Mrs. Phelps achieved notoriety for her accomplishments. For her scientific work, she was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850, becoming the second woman to be inducted.28 She wrote more than 20 books and many articles throughout her career, on topics ranging from science and education to the arts and public affairs.29
Mrs. Phelps’ work in women’s education made an enormous impact on the field across the nation. However, while her work in New England was important, and her career in women’s education left an “indelible mark,”30 her work at Patapsco Female Institute is considered by many as her “important contribution” along with her textbook writing.31 As Helen Buss Mitchell, author of The North and South Here Meet, a work about the Institute, wrote in a letter supporting Phelps’ nomination into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame, “Without exaggeration, her principalship[sic] of the Patapsco Female Institute put Maryland on the intellectual map.”32
Mrs. Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps had an enormous impact on the growth of women’s education, particularly in the state of Maryland. She pushed back against the society that looked favorably upon men who engaged in self-improvement and scorned women who pursued the same. As Anne Scott has noted, Phelps was a “self-made woman” who stretched the boundaries of the acceptable women’s sphere.33 Phelps was both a traditional woman, investing herself in the home and lives of her children and husband, and a visionary, working hard to provide equitable education for women. In the words of her biographer, Emma Bolzau, “the women of America owe a debt of gratitude to her.”34
Endnotes:
1. Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, "Reminiscence,"
American
Ladies' Magazine, Vol 7, No. 12, p.530. Return to text
2. Ibid. Return to text
3. Anne Firor Scott, “Almira Lincoln
Phelps: The Self-Made Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Maryland Historical
Magazine, 75 (1980): 208. Return to text
4. Bolzau, 248. Return
to text
5. Bolzau, 84. Return
to text
6. Mary K. McPherson, "Almira Hart
Lincoln Phelps, 1793-1884," In Notable Maryland Women, (Cambridge,
MD: Tidewater Publishers, 1977), 275. Return to text
7. Helen Buss Mitchell, "The North
and South Here Meet": Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps and the Patapsco Female
Institute, 1841-1856,
(University of Maryland College Park, 1990),
2. Return to text
8. Mitchell, 141. Return
to text
9. Scott, 211. Return
to text
10. Ibid. Return to
text
11. McPherson, 278. Return
to text
12. Mitchell, 260-261. Return
to text
13. Mitchell, 303-304. Return
to text
14. Mitchell, 306. Return
to text
15. GOVENOR (Miscellaneous Papers),
letter from Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps to Governor Augustus Bradford, August
11, 1862, Box 68 folder 26, MSA S1274-68, MdHR 6636-68-26-7. Return
to text
16. GOVENOR (Miscellaneous Papers),
letter from Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps to Governor Augustus Bradford, August
12, 1862, Box 68 folder 25, MSA S 1274-68, MdHR 6636-68-25-2. Return
to
text
17. Ibid. Return to
text
18. L. Allison Wilmer, J. H. Jarrett
and Geo. W. F. Vernon,
History and Roster of Maryland Volunteers, War
of 1861-5, Volume 1. (Baltimore: Guggenheimer, Weil, & Co., 1899),
277. Also can be found at Archives of Maryland Online, https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000367/html/am367--277.html,
Return
to text
19. See archives biography for Charles
Edward Phelps, http://www.msa.md.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/002100/002110/html/02110bio.html,
or see Congressional Medal of Honor recipient page, http://www.cmohs.org/recipient-detail/1056/phelps-charles-e.php,
Return to text
20. Sally Bright, "2010 Maryland
Women's Hall of Fame Nomination."Return to text
21. "Almira Phelps." Notable Women
Scientists. Gale Group, 2000. Return to text
22. Mitchell, 334. Return
to text
23. Bolzau, 378. Return
to text
24. Ibid. Return to
text
25. Scott, 201. Return
to text
26. BALTIMORE COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT
BUREAU OF VITAL STATISTICS (Death Record) Almira H. L. Phelps, July 15,
1884, Certificate No. 76786, MSA CM1132-24, CR 48,068. Return
to text
27. "A Noted Teacher's Death," New
York Times, July 16, 1884. Return to text
28. Stegman, 72. Return
to text
29. Notable Women Scientists.Return
to text
30. Stegman, 72. Return
to text
31. McPherson, 280. Return
to text
32. Helen Buss Mitchell, support
letter, "2010 Maryland Women's Hall of Fame Nomination."Return
to text
33. Scott, 215. Return
to text
34. Bolzau, 481. Return
to text
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