Locust Dell Academy
Alabama
On this ground once stood Locust Dell Academy, a school for girls that ran from eighteen thirty-four to eighteen forty-three. It was the work of a remarkable couple. Nicholas Marcellus Hentz was a Frenchman, a painter, a self-taught spider scientist, and a professor.
His wife, Caroline Lee Hentz, was a New Englander from Massachusetts who helped run the academy while writing plays, poems, and stories. She would go on to become one of the most widely read American novelists of her day, and the diary she kept of her Florence years is a vivid window into antebellum Alabama. Girls here studied reading, mathematics, composition, and painting at a time when serious education for women was rare.
The academy site is now part of the University of North Alabama, where the building houses the Department of History.
