Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/695

654 and that the family might have the advantages of intellectual help and stimulus. But in May, 1846, Mr. Willard's health demanded a change of climate and life in the open. He moved his family to Wisconsin, then a territory, and settled on a farm, near the young village of Janesville. Miss Willard wrote many years afterward of their pioneer life here on a farm, half prairie, half forest, on the banks of the Rock River. She says that her career as a reformer had its root and growth in the religious character of the family in this log cabin neighborhood. Their abode was named Forest Home, and in the earlier years without what a Yankee would call "near neighbors" the family were almost entirely dependent upon their own resources for society. Mrs. Willard was poetical in her nature and she made herself at once mentor and companion to her children. The father, too, was near to nature's heart in a real and vivid fashion of his own. And so the children, reared in a home which was to their early years a world's horizon, lived an intellectual and yet a most helpful life. Miss Willard enjoyed entire freedom from fashionable restraint until her seventeenth year, clad during most of the year in simple flannel suits, and spent much of the time in the open air, sharing the occupations and sports of her brothers. Her first teachers were her educated parents; later an accomplished young woman was engaged as family teacher and companion for the children. Her first schoolmaster was a graduate of Yale College. At the age of seventeen she, with her sister Mary, was sent from home to school, entering Milwaukee Female College, in 1857. She completed her education at the Northwestern Female College, in Evanston, Illinois. After several years of teaching, her soul was stirred by the reports of the temperance crusade in Ohio during the winter of 1874, and in this she felt she heard the divine call of her life work. Of all her friends, no one stood by her in her wish to join the crusade except Mrs. Mary A.