Qualla: Salem Academy https://qualla.com/salem-academy en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Salem Academy https://qualla.com/salem-academy Salem Academy: Introduction https://qualla.com/salem-academy/ Photo credit Salem Female Academy (Winston-Salem, N.C.), Public domain. Sixteen girls and women walked roughly five hundred miles from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to a Moravian settlement called Salem in colonial North Carolina. Most of them walked on foot. The year was the early 1770s. One of them, Elisabeth Oesterlein, was seventeen years old, and on April 22, 1772, she became the first teacher of what was then called the Little Girls' School. There were very few girls' schools anywhere in colonial America in 1772. There were almost none in the South. Salem Academy has not closed its doors in the two and a half centuries since, through the American Civil War, a nineteenth-century measles epidemic, and the rest of what those two centuries contained.

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Image: Salem Female Academy (Winston-Salem, N.C.) | Public domain

]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/dnqv-salem-academy-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Salem Academy: Why the Moravians https://qualla.com/salem-academy/ Photo credit Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Moravian Church, then a small Protestant community with European roots in what is now the Czech Republic, held an idea that was unusual for its time: that girls deserved an education comparable to the one given boys. The Moravians did not invent the principle, but in eighteen...

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Image: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/dnqv-salem-academy-why-the-moravians.mp3 0:06 2 full Salem Academy: Sarah Childress Polk and Other Alumnae https://qualla.com/salem-academy/ Photo credit Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sarah Childress Polk, who attended Salem from 1817 to 1819, went on to marry James K. Polk and serve as First Lady of the United States from 1845 to 1849. Her education here was a rare privilege at the time, particularly in a slaveholding South where most white women received onl...

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Image: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/dnqv-salem-academy-sarah-childress-polk-and-other-alumnae.mp3 0:06 3 full Salem Academy: On the Campus https://qualla.com/salem-academy/ Photo credit Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Salem Academy shares its campus with Salem College on the edge of historic Old Salem, the carefully preserved Moravian town where the school began. Many of the buildings around the academy date to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; some predate the United States. The ...

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Image: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/dnqv-salem-academy-on-the-campus.mp3 0:06 4 full Salem Academy: Smoosh Cake and the Saber https://qualla.com/salem-academy/ Photo credit Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0. What a school carries through 250 years are the small things. The mascot is the Saber. The school colors are purple and gold. At the Athletic Picnic each fall, the entire student body learns whether it has been assigned to the purple team or the gold team for the year, and a scho...

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Image: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/dnqv-salem-academy-smoosh-cake-and-the-saber.mp3 0:06 5 full Salem Academy: The Long View https://qualla.com/salem-academy/ Photo credit Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0. About a quarter of Salem Academy students each year come from outside the United States, from countries that have varied over the decades to include Germany, South Korea, Trinidad, Albania, Dominica, Lithuania, the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, and China. Salem requires twenty aca...

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Image: Bjoertvedt | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/v/salem-academy-wp/dnqv-salem-academy-the-long-view.mp3 0:06 6 full