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778 Rev. Elijah Willard, was forty years a pastor in Dublin, N. H. His son. Oliver Atherton Willard, was a pioneer, first in Wheelock, Vt., and later in Ogden. Monroe county, N. Y., where he died at the age of forty-two, leaving to his widow, Catherine Lewis Willard, a woman of strong character and remarkable gifts, the task of rearing a young family in a country then almost a wilderness. Josiah, the oldest child, grew to maturity.

At the age of twenty-six he was married to Mary Thompson Hill, born in the same year as himself in Danville, Vt. Frances was the fourth of five children born to Josiah and Mary Willard, two of whom had passed away in infancy before her birth. Inheriting many of the notable gifts of both parents and of more remote ancestors, Frances grew up in an atmosphere most favorable to the development of her powers. In her second year her parents removed from Churchville to Oberlin, Ohio, that the father might carry out a long-cherished plan of further study, and that the family might have the advantages of intellectual help and stimulus. They remained in Oberlin five years, both parents improving their opportunities for study. Mr. Willard's health demanding change of climate and life in the open air, he removed with his family, in May, 1846, to Wisconsin, then a territory, and settled on a farm near the young village of Janesville. Their first advent was to the log house of a relative. Frances is remembered as at that time a child of six-and-a-half years, small and delicate. The family were soon settled on an estate of their own, a beautiful farm, half prairie, half forest, on the banks of Rock river. Their abode was named "Forest Home." In the earlier years, without near neighbors, the family were almost entirely dependent upon their own resources for society. Mrs. Willard was poetical in her nature, but life was to her ethical and philosophical as well as poetical. With a memory stored with lofty sentiments in prose and verse, she was at once mentor and companion to her children. The father was "near to nature's heart" in a real and vivid fashion of his own. The children, reared in a home which was to their early years the world's horizon, lived an intellectual, yet a most healthful, life. Frances enjoyed entire freedom from fashionable restraints until her seventeenth year. She was 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 brother and sister. 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 and a former classical tutor in Oberlin. At the age of seventeen Frances, with her sister Mary, was sent from home to school, entering Milwaukee Female College in 1857. In the spring of 1858 they were transferred to the Northwestern Female College, in Evanston, Ill., and thither the parents removed in the following autumn, that they might educate the children without breaking up the home circle Miss Willard was graduated from that institution in 1859, with valedictory honor. A brief term of teaching in 1858 was the introduction to her successful life as a teacher, covering sixteen years in six locations and several prominent positions, her pupils in all numbering about two-thousand. Beginning in the district school, she taught a public school in Evanston and one in Harlem, 111. She then taught in Kankakee Academy, in the Northwestern Female College, in Pittsburgh Female College, in the drove school, Evanston, was preceptress in Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, Lima, N. Y., and was president of the Ladies' College, Evanston, later the Woman's College of the Northwestern University, of which she was dean and professor of aesthetics in the University. Her success as a teacher was very marked. In coeducation she was ever an earnest believer, and she dealt with the unsolved problems of coeducation in its early stages with cheer, hopefulness and skill. As president of the Ladies' College, Evanston, she was free to work her will, as she says, "as an older sister of girls," and there was instituted her system of self-government, which bore excellent fruit and has been fol- lowed in other institutions with success. The Roll of Honor Club, open to all pupils, had for its general principles "to cooperate with the faculty in securing good order and lady-like behavior among the boarding pupils, both in study and recreation hours, in inspiring a high sense of honor, personal responsibility and self-respect." Pupils were not regarded as on the roll of honor after they had transgressed a single regulation of the club, and their places were supplied by those whose lives were above reproach. From the roll of honor, girls were graduated after a specified length of time to the list of the self-governed and took this pledge: "I promise so to conduct myself that, if other pupils followed my example, our school would need no rules whatever, but each young lady would be trusted to be a law unto herself." At the ck»e of the first year twelve young ladies were on the self-governed list, and all the rest were on the roll of honor. Miss Willard's associates in the faculty of the Woman's College were a unit with her in aims, method and personal affection. The Chicago fire swept away a large part of the financial aid which had been pledged to the college in Evanston as an independent enterprise, and in 1873 it became an organic part of the university with which, from the beginning, it had been connected as a sister institution with an independent faculty. The new arrangement led to complications in the government of the Woman's College, which rendered it