Lindenwood University: The First Women's College West of the Mississippi

The campus you are passing in St. Charles has the distinction of being the second-oldest institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi River, and the first to educate women here. Lindenwood University was founded by a remarkable couple, Mary Easton Sibley and her husband George Sibley, who had come west as part of the early American expansion and decided the frontier needed educated women as badly as it needed anything else.

Mary Sibley was the daughter of Rufus Easton, one of Missouri's first attorneys general, and she brought east-coast educational values to the frontier. In eighteen twenty-nine the Sibleys purchased two hundred eighty acres of land outside St. Charles, named it Linden Wood for the grove of linden trees on the property, and began building. Mary's twelve-year-old sister Alby became the first student in the fall of eighteen thirty, and a school had begun.

For years Lindenwood operated as a female seminary, a serious academic institution at a time when most Americans debated whether women needed rigorous education at all. Mary Sibley insisted they did. She taught herself and recruited faculty and pushed the curriculum to match what was being offered in the east. In eighteen fifty-three the Missouri Legislature formally incorporated the school as Lindenwood College for Women.

For well over a hundred years the university dated its founding to eighteen twenty-seven, based on a reference in an early history book. Then in twenty twenty-three, the Board of Trustees formally voted to update the official founding year to eighteen thirty-two, following a review of the Sibleys' correspondence and journals showing the school actually opened that year. It is a rare thing: a university officially correcting its own birthday.

Lindenwood became coeducational in the nineteen seventies and is now a comprehensive university serving thousands of students. The original linden grove still stands on the historic campus, a quiet remnant of the clearing where a frontier woman decided education could not wait for civilization to arrive.