Sarah Pierce - Litchfield Female Academy

Litchfield Female Academy

The Litchfield Female Academy had an academic curriculum which developed and grew throughout its thirty-one year history. In 1792 the school differed little from the large number of small female academies opening throughout the country, especially in the northeastern states. Pierce first offered a limited curriculum of a smattering of English, ancient and European history, geography, arithmetic and composition. The presence of Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School from 1784 to 1833 greatly enhanced the success of Sarah Pierce’s school. The presence of the law school helped the academy to achieve a national reputation. Families from distant homes often sent their daughters to school in Litchfield while their sons were also traveling there to attend the law school. The presence of the two schools ensured an active social life, seen as a part of the educational training of young women. More than 100 of Sarah Pierce’s pupils married students from the Law School, helping to reinforce the fame of the academy. Many students of the two schools later sent their own daughters to the Litchfield Female Academy.

Many educational historians have dismissed the importance of the Litchfield Female Academy because of the supposed emphasis on art and needlework, rather than examining the ways in which Pierce integrated the academic subjects and the ornamental arts, using painting and embroidery to enforce intellectual topics. Unlike most women heading female academies, Pierce was lacking in any talent for art, needlework, music and French, hiring assistant teachers for those subjects. She continued instruction in these traditional disciplines, which were demanded by most parents in the education of their daughters. At the same time however, she was unopposed to developing a more demanding academic curriculum far in advance of most female academies of the period. She sent her nephew, John Pierce Brace, to Williams College to receive training in teaching the “higher branches” of mathematics and science. He joined the school as her assistant in 1814, teaching till 1832 when he left to take over his former student Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Academy.

The Litchfield Female Academy was run by Sarah Pierce as a proprietary school. In 1798 the leading men of the town took up a subscription of $385 to build an academy building for Pierce’s school, but left full control of the school to Pierce. She ran the school efficiently making a substantial profit while providing a means of support for many members of her family. It was only in 1827, when Pierce was sixty years old and the school was in decline, that a board of trustees was formed and the school incorporated in order to finance a new building in an attempt to attract more students. The effort was not a success and John Pierce Brace left Litchfield to head the Hartford Female Seminary in 1832. The Board attempted to keep the school going, with former students as teachers, but to no avail. By the following year Pierce ended her 41 year association with the school.