ATHOL — On April 2, a ceremony will be held at the Silver Lake Pavilion to honor two area women who founded what is now known as Spelman College, the oldest all-women’s historically Black college or university in the country. The event will take place in large part due to the efforts of Orange resident Priscilla Gaignard. Among those expected to attend, along with local dignitaries, are some two dozen Spelman alumni.
Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles were both born in New Salem and were members of the Baptist Church that sat near the New Salem-Prescott town line, now home to the Swift River Historical Society. In 1878, 13 years after the end of the Civil War, the two women traveled to the Deep South and were struck by the lack of educational opportunities for Black women and girls.
Gaignard said upon returning home, the women sought funding to establish a school in the South to provide a Christian education, along with vocational training.
“They went to the Baptist Church up here and asked for funding,” Gaignard explained, “and they refused. They said it was too dangerous for two White women to be going down there after the Civil War and helping out the Blacks. They also said they thought they were too old (Packard was 54 and Giles was 50).
“So, they somehow heard about the First Baptist Church in Medford, and they had a lot of abolitionists there. The minister there said he thought it was too dangerous, too, but he said he would allow them to give their presentation to the congregation, even though the people who went there weren’t very rich.”
The congregation ultimately provided Giles and Packard with over $100, and the women had the money needed to fulfill their calling.
The pair ultimately established a school in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1881, Spelman Seminary was organized. It was named after a patron of the school. Packard was named the first president of the institution, serving in that capacity until her death in 1890. Giles served as school secretary until Packard’s passing, at which time she was elevated to principal. She held that position until her passing in 1910.
In 1920, following years of exponential growth and a greatly expanded curriculum, Spelman Baptist Seminary became Spelman College. It eventually became affiliated with Morehouse College and Atlanta University.
Some of Spelman’s most well-known graduates include civil rights activist and attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, voting rights activist and current Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia Stacey Abrams, and novelist, poet and activist Alice Walker, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel “The Color Purple.”
Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles are both buried at Silver Lake Cemetery and Gaignard said she is having new maps of the cemetery drawn up by Casey Williams. A small ceremony is also planned at the cemetery for the morning of April 2.
“She’s drawing up a new map of the cemetery because the one I had was from the 1800s and it’s really difficult to read,” said Gaignard. “It will specifically point out where the Giles/Packard burial site is.
“We’ll have a couple of speakers,” Gaignard added. “We’re going to send out invitations to Selectboard members, librarians, different folks who we think would be interested in coming. And to different churches, because they were members of the Baptist Church that used to sit on the New Salem/Prescott town line. That church now happens to be (part of) the Swift River Valley Historical Society.”
The April 2 event at 10 a.m. at the Silver Lake Pavilion will be open to the public.
“We’ll probably have extra ones (cemetery maps) that we’ll have at the libraries and the historical societies, the Chamber of Commerce, because this is also a great educational tool for the local schools and interested people in general. So many people are unaware of these ladies.”
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com