Sarah Porter Born

Here we must acknowledge a person who profoundly influenced the cultural life of Farmington, and helped develop a small-town intelligentsia. Sarah Porter (1813–1900), daughter of the long-serving pastor Noah Porter of the First Church of Christ, was of course the founder of Miss Porter’s School in 1843. Among the array of academies for young ladies, Miss Porter’s in the beginning was more domestically oriented than the seriously intellectual schools of Mary Lyon (later Mount Holyoke College) and Emma Willard, founder of a Troy, N.Y., preparatory school for young women. Though Porter’s curriculum strongly emphasized the arts, literature and music, she was a strong-minded woman who also trained her students in the natural sciences, philosophy and other skills perhaps not considered “ladylike” in those days.