Oread Institute

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Oread Castle

The Oread Institute was a women's college founded in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1849 by Eli Thayer. Before its closing in 1934, it was one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United States. According to the Worcester Women's History Project:

"The Oread offered three levels of instruction: primary, academic and collegiate. The four-year collegiate program offered a classical, college-level curriculum and is thought to be the first institution of its kind exclusively for women in the country. It was modeled after the program at Brown University, Thayer’s alma mater" [1].

Two graduates of Oread, Sophia Packard and ornamental music teacher Harriet Giles, would eventually found Spelman College, named after Oread graduate Laura Spelman Rockefeller. Laura Spelman was the future wife of John D. Rockefeller, having attended Oread while her future husband, who dropped out of Cleveland's Central High School in the 1850s, worked as a clerk. One of Spelman's instructors was abolitionist John Brown.

From 1898-1904 it was the Worcester Domestic Science Cooking School and was finally closed in 1934 [2].