Mount Hermon Seminary was a school for Black women that Sarah Ann Dickey, a white teacher from Ohio, opened in Clinton late in 1875, months after the Clinton Massacre. The United Brethren Church had sent Dickey to Vicksburg after the city fell in 1863, and over nineteen months her mission school drew more than three hundred freedpeople, mostly adults, and most of them learned to read and write. She then went north to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, graduated in 1869, and modeled her own school on it. In Clinton she bought 160 acres with a large house and a barn, and later another 120 acres from Walter Hillman, president of the town's Central Female Institute.
Dickey attended the Republican rally at Moss Hill on September 4, 1875, and afterward wrote to President Grant that the worst of what happened at Clinton could not be told. State senator Charles Caldwell, an organizer of that rally, was president of the seminary's board of trustees; after he was assassinated that December, Hillman took his place. Several hundred girls enrolled over the years, and more than two hundred earned certificates to teach.
Dickey was ordained a minister of the United Brethren Church in 1896 and ran the seminary until her death in January 1904. The American Missionary Association kept it open, with 110 students and six teachers in 1908, and closed it in 1924. Sumner Hill High School was dedicated on the property in 1956 and continues as Sumner Hill Junior High School on West Northside Drive, where a marker honoring Dickey was placed in 2016.
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32.3588, -90.3359
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