Page:Shimer College History 1853-1950.pdf/2

 legislator, the townspeople secured in 1852 the passage of a bill in the Legislature incorporating their project as Mount Carroll Seminary.

Shimer College History 1853-1950 - Cindarella Gregory.jpg CINDARELLA GREGORY, 1853-1871

The next hurdle was to secure competent teachers. Accordingly, Attorney John Wilson wrote his friend Isaac Nash of New York State suggesting that his sister-in-law, Frances Wood, come out and take charge of the incorporated, but, as yet, non-existent Mount Carroll Seminary.

Frances Ann Wood, born in Milton, Saratoga County, New York, August 21, 1826, started to school at the tender age of 2 1/2, went away from home at 7 to live with a cousin whose husband was principal of a school Frances attended until, overwhelmed with homesickness, she was allowed to return home. Left motherless at the age of ten, she made her home with an older sister, Caroline, Mrs. Isaac Nash, until sent to Stillwater Academy when not yet twelve. At fourteen she begged to keep house for her father, which she continued to do all through her 'teens with great efficiency, her father taking great pride in her housekeeping ability. In addition, she taught a country school near her home until she had earned enough to put herself through the New York Normal School at Albany. Here she graduated in 1849 after one year only of intensive study "day and night" to complete the course.

In her young womanhood she had been thrilled by accounts her older brother, Talmadge, wrote home from Missouri and points farther west about his adventures as a hunter, trapper, scout and Indian fighter. He was in some way connected with the pioneer Whitman Party that went out to the Oregon country. He was interested in a saw mill and lumbering. Then, during the gold rush fever, he was lured to California, where he was murdered by Indians. His letters, doubtless, made a profound impression on "Cis," as he called young Frances, whetting her appetite for adventure. So, when opportunity offered to go out to the pioneer country and start a school, it was a challenge she could not resist.

Cindarella Gregory, of Naples, Ontario County, New York, a Normal School classmate and friend, who was teaching in Milton and boarding at the Nash home, was urged to join Frances in this undertaking. After corresponding with incorporator, John Wilson, H.G. Grattan and others, the two young women were persuaded to go west in the spring of 1853 and start the school.

Frances Ann was then a slender, dark-haired girl of 26, Cindarella a dignified but sprightly young woman of shorter, slighter build. Frances had shown the symptoms of TB, so, when the invitation to come west arrived, her family thought a change of climate might do her good. Her body may have been frail, but her subsequent activities proved that she had the heart of a lioness, ready to spring into action with singular directness of purpose, force and strategy in pursuit of her aims. As years passed she developed into a woman of heroic mould.