A single brick wall is all that stands of Elizabeth Female Academy, which the Methodists opened at Washington on November 12, 1818, and which Bishop Charles Galloway, writing its history in 1899, called the mother of female colleges. Though called an academy, it did full collegiate work and conferred degrees, and Galloway judged it the first chartered institution for the higher education of women in the South, if not the nation. The land and buildings were given by Elizabeth Roach, later Greenfield, and the school took her name. Boarders numbered between 28 and 63 a year through the 1820s, and the senior class studied chemistry, botany, Latin and natural and moral philosophy. John James Audubon taught drawing at the academy for a short time in 1822.
Under Caroline Thayer, who arrived in 1825, it drew new students and its buildings were enlarged. It closed in 1845, worn down by the removal of the state capital from Natchez to Jackson, the drift of population and repeated yellow fever epidemics.
Galloway, who visited before 1898, described a building two and a half stories high, the ground floor of brick and the upper floors of frame, in a style he thought borrowed from Spanish colonial work. Fire had reduced it to ruins in the late 1870s. The surviving wall, measured in 1974, is 13 inches thick and just over 12 feet high, with two fireplaces between two windows, and the outline of the building, about 50 by 36 feet, could still be traced. The ruins are at milepost 5.1.
Getting there
31.5747, -91.2942
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
