09/05/2026
A seventeen year old girl opened a school for three children in a Moravian settlement in 1772, and it never closed. 📖
The Moravians who built Salem in the North Carolina Piedmont did something unusual for their century. They took the education of girls seriously as a matter of principle, not as an ornament. Among the town's early residents were sixteen girls and women who had traveled roughly five hundred miles from Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, most of the way on foot, to join the new community.
In late April 1772 they started what they called the Little Girls' School. The teacher was Elisabeth Oesterlein, who was seventeen years old. There were three students, Maria Magdalena Meyer, Anna Elizabeth Bagge and Maria Magdalena Schmid. One young woman, three children, one room.
That school became Salem Academy, and by its 1772 founding date it is the oldest continuously operating educational institution for girls and women in the country. 🕯️ There is something worth sitting with in the arithmetic. Four people in a room in a frontier village, at a moment when almost nobody in the English speaking world thought a girl's schooling was worth building anything permanent for, and the thing they started is still running two hundred and fifty four years later.
