Wake County, NC - Bicentennial File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Barbara Kawamoto Reprinted with permission of the News & Observer and cannot be reproduced without permission. St. Mary’s: ‘A Thorough and Elegant Education . . .’ The News & Observer Raleigh 200/The New Capital December 29, 1991 The deal, as the Rev. Aldert Smedes recalled it, was struck without excess ceremony. It was the fall of 1841, and Smedes had just been introduced to the Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, the Right Rev. Levi Silliman Ives, at a New York conference. The conversation went like this: "Bishop, what sort of place would Raleigh be for a school for girls?" "The best in the United States." "Have you any buildings there?" "The best in the United States." "Why don’t you open a school there?" "I am now looking for a man." "Bishop, I am your man." "The very man I want." So began St. Mary’s College, Raleigh’s oldest college, the only Episcopal-related women’s college in the country, and one of the few surviving intermediary schools where students take their last two years of high school and their first two years of college. It actually started out as a boys’ school. Bishop Ives wanted a diocesan school to train clergymen, and the Episcopal School of North Carolina in Raleigh opened in June 1834. It had a promising headmaster in Joseph Cogswell, a former Harvard professor who had founded a boarding school in Connecticut. Cogswell soon was complaining that life in the new capital was inelegant - he found a water moccasin in his bed, among other indignities. He also said the abolitionist movement was discussed in "language a bit too strong for Yankee pride." He left in April 1835. The school fell into dire financial straits and closed in 1838. The Episcopal diocese rented the buildings to private schools for a time, but at its 1840 convention, ordered the property sold. Judge Duncan Cameron, a wealthy planter, leading Episcopal churchman and president of the State Bank, was the only bidder at a public auction. He got the property by buying out the church’s $10,000 indebtedness. Bishop Ives then encountered Smedes in New York. Smedes and his family moved to Raleigh, and rented the land and buildings from Cameron. On May 12, 1842, 13 students were welcomed to the new girls’ school, designed to give females as good an education as they could have found in the North. ============================================================== USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. The electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. ==============================================================