Back to School with the Tredwells
by Merchant's House Museum
Classroom at Mrs. Okill’s Academy, drawn by a boarding student in 1850, when the Tredwell sisters were students.
The five older Tredwell girls were students at Mrs. Okill’s Academy, one of the most elite private female academies of the time. Located at 8-10 Clinton Street (now 8th Street), Mrs. Okill’s offered a “fashionable education” to young ladies. The school was housed in two connecting buildings each with a floor plan similar to that of the Merchant’s House. Here boarding students from as far away as Ohio and Louisiana joined day students like the Tredwells in the study of academic subjects, including the French language, as well musical training, considered an essential accomplishment of refined young ladies.
Our current special exhibition, Lessons Learned: The Tredwell Daughters’ Schoolbooks, is on display through Monday, September 29, and features rarely exhibited schoolbooks from the Museum’s collection, some bearing the comments and signature of Mrs. Okill herself.
[…] came in to sit an hour, or two. I took Rem- sen, and went up to Mrs Okill’s, went in the school rooms, found Louis in his class. Miss Mitchell, his teacher gave a good […]