#52Ancestors: Week 12 – Joined Together
Lisa Louise Cooke is a professional genealogist who writes books, runs several Facebook Pages, hosts a website, produces genealogy podcasts, gives lectures, and generally does all things genealogy. For the last several years she has sponsored a yearlong challenge called “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks,” in which she challenges genealogists to write once a week in response to prompts she provides. She provides a dedicated place in her Facebook Group Generations Café where people post what they have written each week.
I took her up on the challenge this year, and we are now on week 12. The prompt for this week was “Joined Together;” she elaborated on this prompt by asking “Could it be a marriage? Could it be an organization? Could it be a carpenter/mason/builder? It can be whatever you make it out to be!” Here’s my response to the challenge.
I had to think a while before deciding what to write for this week. I usually try to write about immediate, or at least direct, ancestors. But this week I’m going to write about my 6th cousin 5x removed, Sophia Packard (1824-1891). No, I haven’t lost my mind. I love everything about this story, and this week gives me an opportunity to tell it. This is actually two joining together stories – how I “joined” myself to my distant relative Sophia Packard, and how she “joined” with another woman to make a difference in the lives of millions of people.
When I Met Sophia
I first encountered Sophia Packard while I was working on my pandemic-year project – 52 Locations in 52 Weeks. This project almost did me in. Thank goodness everything was shut down for most of 2020 – it gave me the time to complete this project.
One of the locations I wrote about was Plymouth County, Massachusetts, where I not only had ancestors who had descended from passengers on the Mayflower, but also had other ancestors as well. One of these was Samuel Packard (1612-1684), who came to Massachusetts in 1638 and was a colonial tavernkeeper in various towns in Massachusetts before settling permanently in Bridgewater.
In 1888, the Packard Memorial Association in Brockton (part of the town if Bridgewater) held an event to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Samuel Packard’s arrival in the area. Fortunately for me, the Association (which was formed for the sole purpose of planning this celebration) created a 75-page publication giving the history of the town and emphasizing the role that Samuel Packard played in it. (Celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing of Samuel Packard in this country: August 10, 1638, at Brockton, Massachusetts, by Benjamin Winslow Packard, 1888, microfilmed by the Family History Library at Salt Lake City and retrieved from Ancestry.com).
The event included speeches made by Packard descendants from all over the country – from Massachusetts, of course, but also Maine, Minnesota, and Georgia. I want to talk briefly about the presentation made by Sophie Packard, introduced as the “head of a school of six hundred and fifty pupils” in Atlanta. But there’s more to her story. In 1880, after a career as an educator in Massachusetts, Sophie and her long-time companion Harriet Giles made a tour of the South and decided to open a school for African-American women and girls in Atlanta. The school began as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. In 1884, John D. Rockefeller paid off the debts accrued in purchasing a permanent site for the school; in exchange, the school was named Spelman Seminary in hour of Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman. In 1924, the name of the school was changed again, to Spelman College. Spelman College in Atlanta continues today as a renowned HBCU (Historically Black College or University), attracting African-American women from around the globe.
When Sophie spoke at the 1885 event in Brockton, this school had only been in existence for seven years. Here is how Sophie explained her reasons for founding the school:
“We went down to Atlanta, Georgia, because we felt something should be done for the colored girls in the South. For if you care about the country, you must care for the women and girls. In every place it is they who give character and tone to society, the colored no less than the white, but far more. If we evangelize those, we will have both white and colored. We went there with nothing, and commenced to teach in the basement of a colored church, and we called on the girls.”
When Sophia Met Hattie:
This second story tells of the “joining together” of Sophie and her long-term companion Harriet E. “Hattie” Giles. Sophia and Hattie first met in the 1850s, when Hattie was a student at the New Salem Academy in New Salem, Massachusetts, and Packard was the preceptor – another word for headmaster or principal, although it might also have meant simply “teacher.” Their relationship continued past Hattie’s schooling; the 1860 census shows them teaching and living together in a boarding house in Hartford, Connecticut, and by 1870 they were teaching and living together in a different boarding house in Boston, Massachusetts. By 1881, they had moved to Atlanta, where they co-founded the eventual Spelman College in 1881.
I first encountered the idea that their relationship was more than simply “companionable” through a post in a blog, entitled Lesbian Power Couples From History Who Changed the World Together https://www.autostraddle.com/16-lesbian-power-couples-from-history-who-changed-the-world-together-372223/. This post referenced a book To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History, by Lillian Faderman (2020), where I learned more about their relationship. I found the book on Amazon, and downloaded it to my Kindle so I could read the portion on Sophia and Hattie. Faderman provides details about their relationship, recounting the following:
“They had met years earlier, when Harriet was a senior at a New England girls’ academy where Sophia, who was ten years older, was a preceptress. In 1859 they had opened a short-lived school together in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and in the years that followed they taught together in various other New England schools. Sophia’s diary entries at this time suggest her two main desires: they refer to Harriet as ‘my darling Hattie,’ and they implore God to ‘lay me out for usefulness!.’
“In 1864, Sophia Packard became the head of the Oread Collegiate Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. A nineteenth-century ‘History of the Oread Collegiate Institute’ describes her as ‘a woman of powerful intellect and strong will, aggressive and energetic, with almost a masculine genius for business and capacity for leadership’ (though the usually disconcerting gender reference was modified by the assurance that she was ‘a thoroughly conservative and devoted Christian’). The author does not draw the conclusions that became inevitable in the twentieth century when recalling that Packard was assisted in her various duties by ‘Miss Hattie E. Giles, her devoted friend, with whom she had been constantly associated in all she had done for ten years.… It would have been impossible for a school girl of those days to speak or think of one without the other. They dressed alike and in leisure hours were nearly always together. Miss Giles was in character quite unlike Miss Packard, being most gentle, mild, and self-effacing.’ Their romance of opposites was enhanced by their similarities. Both women were interested in the welfare of the freed slaves, and on a trip to the South in 1880 they decided to start a school for African-American women. The Baptist church, to which they appealed, was slow in coming to their assistance, and in her impatience, Harriet Giles sold her piano for start-up money. Eventually they were helped by the church, as well as by John D. Rockefeller (the school was named after Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman). The statement of aims that Sophia Packard prepared emphasized the school’s serious goals: ‘to train the intellect,’ ‘to store the mind with useful knowledge,’ ‘to inspire love for the true and the beautiful.’
“When Sophia Packard died, in 1891, the ‘feminine’ Harriet Giles transcended her habits of demureness and became the head of Spelman. Though the school was not named a college until 1924, Giles established a ‘college department’ in 1897, and in 1901, through classes taken jointly at Spelman and Atlanta Baptist College, College, a men’s school, two African-American women became Spelman’s first college graduates. Spelman was now called alternately ‘the Wellesley of the South’ and ‘the Mount Holyoke of the South.’ Though Giles, like Packard, emphasized professional training in teaching and nursing, students were also encouraged to take liberal arts courses like those given in the elite colleges of the North — rhetoric, Latin, moral and natural philosophy, zoology, geology.
“Harriet Giles made Spelman the foremost school in the country for African-American women. At her death, in 1909, she was buried with the woman with whom she had shared her life for almost forty years. The single tombstone that covers both their graves bears their names on one side, and on the other is the inscription ‘Founders of Spelman Seminary.’”
Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America (pp. 208-209). Lume Books. Kindle Edition.
I read Hattie’s obituary, which extols her contribution to Spelman College but doesn’t mention Sophia at all. Because Sophia and Hattie did not have any children, they have no descendants to put together their story. I realized that genealogical research leaves out the stories of people who had no descendants. Unless the people happened to be famous (usually meaning that they were rich, elected officials, military leaders, authors or artists, or murderers), their stories remain untold, even when the stories are as meaningful as the story of Sophia and Hattie.
One of the pleasures of genealogy research is that it lets me brush up against history I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I have an MA in American History, and I taught American History at the high school level for decades. I continue to teach history in local education programs in my city of Williamsburg, Virginia. But it is only through my genealogy research that I became aware of the story of Sophia Packard, her connection to my roots in Massachusetts, and the pivotal role she and Hattie played in creating opportunities for the education of African-American girls after the Civil War. In the course of my teaching career, I taught several students who went on to college at Spelman. I wish I could have told them about Sophia and Hattie.