Rebecca Kilgore Stuart Red

Red, born in Pennsylvania in 1827, graduated from Steubenville Seminary in Ohio in 1849 with a teaching degree. After teaching in Kentucky she came to Texas in 1852 with her sister and brother-in-law, the Rev. James Weston Miller, and they opened Live Oak Female Seminary at Gay Hill the next February. She is thought to have been the first woman with a college degree to run a college and teach college-level courses in Texas. When Dr. Red retired in 1875, he built her the Austin school so she could keep teaching. All four of their children taught there.

What the plaque says

Rebecca Kilgore Stuart Red (1827-1886) Rebecca Jane Kilgore Stuart became principal of Live Oak Female Seminary in Washington County, Texas, in 1853. In 1854 she married Dr. George Clark Red and continued teaching. The Reds moved to Austin in 1876, and opened Stuart Female Seminary at 1212 East 9th Street. Rebecca continued teaching until nine days before her death in 1886. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Her heirs donated her property to the Presbyterian Synod of Texas in 1899. The Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary was operated at that site from 1902 until 1907. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Harry Ransom Center — 0.6 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 0.7 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.8 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Capitol — 1.2 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.

More markers nearby

• Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Campus — steps away
• Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary — steps away
• All Saints' Episcopal Church — steps away
• John Elbridge Hines — 0.3 mi