Qualla: Asheville Female College

Asheville Female College: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1841 there was no college west of the Blue Ridge. A frontier physician named John Dickson and a Methodist minister named Erastus Rowley decided to change that. They opened the Asheville Female Seminary on the corner of Patton Avenue and Church Street in what was then a small mountain village - population a few hundred, no railroad, the nearest seat of higher learning four hard days' travel east in Raleigh. Over the next sixty years, eight thousand young women came through the school's doors. Some came from as far as North Dakota. Most never would have crossed the Appalachians otherwise. The school they attended was the first institution of higher education in the western portion of North Carolina.

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Asheville Female College: Antebellum Origins

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The seminary opened during the height of cotton-economy slavery in the American South, and Asheville in 1841 was part of that economy - smaller than the lowland plantations but still a place where enslaved Black people did the cooking, laundry, building, and maintenance that made...

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Asheville Female College: The Methodist Years

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between 1851 and 1855 the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church bought the school and renamed it the Holston Conference Female College. The Methodists moved the campus to a seven-acre grove near the heart of town and tried to grow enrollment through a scholarship program tha...

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Asheville Female College: Reopening

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the war a stock company bought the property and sold it to the Rev. James Atkins, who renamed it Asheville Female College and oversaw the construction of a new academic building in 1888. The post-war school rebuilt its enrollment in the new economy of Asheville - a city now...

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Asheville Female College: The Curriculum

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What the women studied changed dramatically across the school's lifetime. Early on the curriculum centered on music, art, French, elocution, and the social arts considered necessary to nineteenth-century female accomplishment. By the 1890s the school had added modern languages, s...

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Asheville Female College: Two Notable Alumnae

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Loula Roberts Platt went from Asheville Female College to becoming a leading North Carolina suffragist and the first woman to run for the North Carolina Senate - exactly the kind of public political career the college's official rhetoric did not endorse. Lula Vollmer became one o...

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