Site of Columbus Female Seminary

The plaque lists the subjects; the school's own record is fuller. Hannibal Pratt, an Episcopal missionary, reported about 1856 that the Masonic female school met in a room in the lower part of the lodge, with twelve trustees pledged to pay $1,500 a year for a man and a woman to teach forty pupils. Philip Riley, the teacher, held enrollment to thirty until 1858, then it doubled. The 1860 census counted sixty students and three teachers. That July the seminary hired J. J. Loomis away from rival Colorado College, and by 1861 the lodge had given up its sponsorship.

What the plaque says

Site of Columbus Female Seminary First organized school in Columbus. Founded Feb. 3, 1851, by Caledonia Lodge No. 68, A. F. & A. M.; housed on first floor of lodge hall at this site. Seminary taught literary subjects, music, art, for many years. Building was destroyed in Sept. 1909 hurricane. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — steps away
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 17 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 18 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 20 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• Homesite of Fannie Baker Darden — steps away
• Site of Railway Hospital — steps away
• City of Columbus — steps away
• Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the American Declaration of Independence — steps away