12 www.CharlestonWomenPodcast.com | www.ReadCW.com | www.Instagram.com/CharlestonWomen If you’re new to the Charleston history scene, there’s a name that should be added to your rolodex of pioneering local women: Henrietta Aiken Kelly. She hoped to make South Carolina famous for a different agricultural venture in the early 20th century and that was after she had already blazed a trail in advancing educational opportunities for women. A SCHOOL OF THEIR OWN At the turn of the 20th century, most colleges admitted only male students. Kelly advocated for young women to have the opportunity to earn a degree, too. She was unsuccessful in her efforts to persuade the College of Charleston to admit women, so she founded a college for them — the Charleston Female Seminary (aka Miss Kelly’s School). The private school was located downtown at 50 St. Philip St., just across from the campus of the College of Charleston, where the Simons Center for the Arts now stands. The school catered to the city’s “most privileged daughters,” embracing not only a classical education but additional coursework in physical education, with the school motto “Mens sana in corpore sano” (A sound mind in a sound body). Kelly urged her students to pursue ways to help others and among her graduates were social activists, missionaries, teachers and nurses, including South Carolina’s first woman doctor, Sarah Campbell Allan and local women’s advocate and suffragist, Sarah Bentschner Visanska. Kelly’s background was in teaching and she had served as vice principal of the city’s first public school, the Charleston Normal School (later renamed Memminger High School). Classes for her newly formed college were initially held in her home at 157 Wentworth St. before moving in 1871 to the location on St. Philip Street, a house that was designed by the prominent Charleston architect John Henry Devereux. SILK DREAMS In 1890, Kelly began taking her students to Europe to expand their educational and cultural opportunities. On one of her trips, she visited an old friend from Charleston who was living in northern Italy and was introduced to the silkworm industry there. Because the region’s climate and soil are comparable to that of the Carolina Lowcountry, she envisioned establishing a silk industry at home which could turn the state’s struggling post-Civil War economy around. This was not the first time such a venture had been pursued in the Lowcountry. Two centuries earlier, Silk Hope Plantation and Mulberry Plantation, both on the Cooper River, had produced silk, but the enterprise was eclipsed by the more lucrative rice industry. There had also previously been two brief episodes of successful silk production in the northeastern states and California in the early and mid-1800s, but an attempt at producing silk in the Midwest had failed due to disease from imported mulberry trees whose leaves comprise the worms’ diet. With the textile industry as the major economic driver in South Carolina in the early 20th century, it seemed to her to be the perfect time to reignite interest in producing silk here. Her plan would offer poor white farmers and sharecroppers a chance to overcome their dire financial straits by running their own businesses. Operating as a family affair, women and children would be part Dreamweaver Heroic pursuits of Henrietta Aiken Kelly BY MARY COY Henrietta Aiken Kelly. Photo courtesy of the Charleston Museum, Charleston SC. Features
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