Benicia Seminary, the Seed of Mills College

In eighteen fifty-two, this site in Benicia became home to the Young Ladies' Seminary of Benicia, one of the earliest schools for women on the Pacific Coast. In eighteen sixty-five, educators Cyrus and Susan Mills acquired the school from its founder Mary Atkins and set about expanding its ambitions.

Six years later, the Mills moved the institution south to Oakland, where it took root on a new campus. In eighteen eighty-five it was renamed Mills College. That institution is Mills College, which went on to become one of the most distinguished women's colleges in the western United States. What began here in Benicia as a modest seminary ultimately shaped more than a century of women's education in California.