Author: Willard, Emma
Biography:
WILLARD, Emma, formerly HART, later YATES (1787-1870: ANBO)
At the halfway point of her life, Emma Willard put her affairs in order as she prepared to cross the Atlantic for the first time; her only collection of poetry was a part of that effort, with the preface dated 30 Sept. 1830, the day before she sailed. The daughter of Lydia (Hinsdale) and Samuel Hart, farmers, she was born in Berlin CT and attended the local district school and an academy in Berlin. She herself began teaching at the district school in 1804 and advanced rapidly in her profession, soon taking charge of the Female Academy in Middlebury VT. In 1809 she became the third wife of a physician, John Willard (1759-1825). They had one son, John Hart Willard (1810-83) and she gave up teaching until 1814, when a financial reversal made it expedient for her to start her own boarding school in their home where, unusually, she included mathematics and philosophy as part of the curriculum. In an attempt to attract public support and funding, she published her innovative educational program in an Address to the Public in 1819 and in 1821 established the Troy Female Seminary in Troy NY, with her husband as business manager. The school offered an expanded range of courses including experimental science (at first with a male tutor) and was a great success. Willard published many tracts, pamphlets, and textbooks, among them Geography for Beginners and a History of the United States that continued to be staples of the schoolroom for decades. Widowed in 1825, she married a Boston physician, Christopher Yates, in 1838, but the marriage was not a success: she left him a year later and divorced him in 1843. Her property had been secured to her son, by then the manager of the school, in a prenuptial agreement, and she returned to Troy, where she continued to campaign for educational reform (though not for women's rights) until her death in 1870. She is buried in Troy's Oakwood Cemetery. (ANBO 6 Feb. 2021; ancestry.com 6 Feb. 2021; RPW) HJ