A Brief History of Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois

by

John J. Dunphy

Benjamin Godfrey easily qualifies as one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in Illinois history. While entire segments of his life remain shrouded in mystery, historians have been able to construct a basic framework that allows us to gain some insight into this remarkable man.

Even Godfrey’s date of birth is disputed, with some sources listing it as May 5, 1794, while others have it as December 4, 1794. However, all sources agree that his birthplace was the Cape Cod village of Chatham, Massachusetts. His formal education was extremely limited, and he went to sea with his stepfather at age nine. Godfrey served in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and was discharged in 1815. He moved to Baltimore and married Harriet Cooper in 1817.

Godfrey became captain of the brig, Emilie, in 1819 and transported slaves from Baltimore, which was the foremost slave-trading city in the Upper South, to New Orleans, the leading slave-trading city in the Lower South. In 1823, Godfrey voyaged from Baltimore to New Orleans and then sailed to Campeche, now the site of Galveston, Texas, and then on to Brazo Santiago, which was located near present-day South Padre Island, Texas. Campeche was the headquarters of Jean Lafitte, the notorious pirate who plundered Spanish ships carrying slaves and then sold the human cargo in New Orleans. Popular lore has long linked Godfrey with Lafitte in various nefarious enterprises, but there is no hard historical evidence to corroborate their association.

After surviving a shipwreck at Brazos Santiago in 1823 or 1824, Godfrey and his family settled in Matamoros, Mexico, a prominent smuggling port, although sources disagree regarding his activities at this time. He left Mexico in 1830 and arrived in Alton in 1832.

Sometime before he reached the River Bend, this slave-trader underwent a life-altering experience. One account claims that, while in route to New Orleans, Godfrey read a passage in the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, the theologian and mystic, that compelled him to change his values. Another source states that Godfrey struck a bargain with God during a near-fatal illness in which he promised that, in return for his recovery, he would give one-half of his possessions to the Almighty.

This second account, which was published in a Chicago newspaper in 1894, concluded that Godfrey’s founding of Monticello Female Seminary represented “God’s portion” of Godfrey’s ill-gotten wealth and thus fulfilled his promise. While the true reason for such a profound change of heart may never be known, it is certain that the Benjamin Godfrey who arrived in Alton in 1832 bore no moral resemblance to the man who had trafficked in shackled human beings. It is also certain that Godfrey felt deeply ashamed of his role in the slave trade. When queried about his past, he simply replied that it would make a novel and then fell silent.

Godfrey chose to settle in Alton after a New Orleans meeting with Winthrop Gilman, who persuaded the former sea captain to move to the River Bend city and become his partner in a freight-forwarding business. In just three years, their firm was the most successful business in Illinois. Godfrey and Gilman soon extended their commercial enterprises to include banking, railroads and real estate.

But Godfrey wanted more than mere wealth. He wanted to better this fledgling community in which he and his family lived. Alton during this period justly deserved its reputation as a rough and rowdy river town, where liquor flowed freely in any number of taverns. Public inebriation was common, and fighting was both a participant and spectator sport. Determined to improve local morals, Godfrey spent thousands of dollars to purchase and distribute Bibles, support the efforts of Protestant ministers and promote the temperance movement. But none of this satisfied the deep moral yearning of the former slave-trader.

Godfrey claimed that the idea of founding a school for women occurred to him in 1832 when he heard one of his children, who was learning to talk, repeating a phrase his wife had just uttered. This simple incidence served to drive home for Godfrey the unique influence that mothers have on their children. It also impressed him with the profound effect that educated women could exert on society as a whole. He decided to found a college where women could receive a quality education. Harriet Godfrey enthusiastically endorsed the idea, and Godfrey resolved to realize this goal.

It was a bold ambition for the time and location. Many American families, particularly those living in frontier communities, regarded education for women a waste of time and money. Women, it was thought, did not require a knowledge of mathematics, history and philosophy to prepare them for good marriages and children.

Godfrey remained undeterred by such criticism but decided to designate his school a seminary rather than a college. “Seminary” conveyed the impression that the school was a distinctly religious enterprise in which students would be educated to become proper young ladies. Godfrey’s subterfuge was not entirely successful, however. Area residents who gathered to watch the seminary’s construction ridiculed it as “Godfrey’s Folly.”

The seminary was called Monticello, since that was the name of the community of Godfrey during most of the nineteenth century. The area had been settled in the 1820s by Nathan Scarritt and became known as Scarritt’s Prairie. Homesteaders and land speculators, particularly expatriate Easterners, began buying property in the new community. James Webb purchased property on the western edge of Scarritt’s Prairie and named it Monticello, after Thomas Jefferson’s residence. Residents of Monticello began calling their village Godfrey in honor of Benjamin Godfrey after the retired seafarer’s death in 1862. Monticello Female Seminary, however, proudly kept its original name.

Godfrey spent approximately $53,000 of his own money in the building of Monticello. Its stones were quarried in Alton and then laboriously transported to the construction site. Local residents, most of whom knew only the simple architecture of the frontier, gathered daily to watch the elegant structure take shape.

The school was built to resemble Nassau Hall at Princeton University. Its lower level housed the kitchen, dining hall and a chapel that could seat 275 congregants. The main floor consisted of classrooms as well as living quarters for the principal and faculty. Two upper floors contained forty boarding rooms for students, who were assigned two to a room.

Monticello formally opened in 1838, with the Reverend Theron Baldwin, a Yale alumnus, as principal. Its course of study, which was based on Yale’s curriculum, included such scholastic mainstays as algebra, geometry, botany, ancient history, geography and other academic subjects. Even the most casual observer could not have mistaken Monticello for a glorified finishing school.

Godfrey and Baldwin were deeply religious men, and the institution they established reflected their faith. Students attended a one-hour devotional service after supper. Monticello’s young ladies were also required to attend a Sunday service, conducted by Theron, in the chapel. Non-denominational religious instruction remained a vital part of Monticello’s curriculum throughout the nineteenth century.

While Godfrey and Baldwin believed that women should receive a quality education, they also thought young ladies should be skilled in the domestic arts. Early Monticello students were required to do their own washing and ironing, tidy up their personal rooms as well as the school’s public rooms and even take turns in setting tables. While this presented no formidable challenge to the middle-class students, the young ladies from wealthy St. Louis and Southern families had no idea how to execute such tasks that were typically performed by servants. Their parents vehemently objected to what they saw as Monticello’s attempt to demean their daughters with the drudgery of manual labor. Godfrey and Baldwin finally capitulated in 1843 and agreed that students were responsible only for keeping their rooms neat and doing their own laundry.

Still, Monticello accepted students of modest means — even students who weren’t white, a genuine rarity for any college at that time. The Ladies Association for Educating Females, a New York-based organization dedicated to promoting women’s education in Illinois, provided scholarships to Monticello for two Cherokee women. Their Monticello education prepared these women for teaching careers at the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. Monticello’s students during its early years also included an impoverished Irish immigrant who worked her way through school. In an autobiographical essay, this Irish lass wrote of getting up at 4 a.m. and working until sundown for fifty cents a day.

Lucy Larcom, whose 1889 autobiography, A New England Childhood, remains a classic of American literature, graduated from Monticello. At age eleven, Larcom began working as a “doffer” — one who replaced empty bobbins on a loom — in a Lowell, Massachusetts, mill. In 1840, Larcom co-founded the Lowell Offering, which published works written by factory workers. Larcom’s poems earned her public recognition as well as the friendship of poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

Larcom journeyed to Illinois in 1846 to teach school and enrolled in Monticello three years later to complete her education. She returned to Massachusetts upon graduation and embarked on a successful career of teaching and writing.

Monticello’s Southern belles quickly departed for home when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Women from Unionist families, however, not only stayed but even assisted in the war effort. One afternoon, the student body sang for several hundred Union Army recruits who had been invited to this morale-boosting concert.

Monticello was guided by its most famous principal — Maine native Harriet Haskell — from 1867 until her death in 1907. Haskell’s Yankee Puritanism colored her administration of Monticello and led her to oppose anything she thought might compromise Monticello’s high moral standards. In 1878, for instance, she purchased twenty acres north of the seminary upon learning that their owner intended to build a race track on the property. Six years later, Haskell purchased land on the south side of Monticello to prevent her school from acquiring “undesirable neighbors.” History does not record the identities of these prospective neighbors or precisely why Haskell deemed them undesirable.

Haskell even objected to the school’s name. Although Monticello remained a “Female” Seminary during her stewardship, she managed to change the title of the school’s annual catalog to Monticello Ladies Seminary. Her New England Puritan mind regarded the term “Female” as coarse, even vulgar. Monticello’s students were Ladies, not Females. In an ironic twist of fate, “Female” was formally dropped from the name of the institution in 1907 — the year of Haskell’s death — and the school became simply Monticello Seminary.

In 1888, the seminary was completely destroyed by fire, but Benjamin Godfrey’s dream refused to die. Just one month after Monticello’s students had returned home, Haskell wrote to invite them back for classes. The women returned to attend “Knotty Hall,” a small frame building with a knotty-pine interior. The class of 1889 had the honor of laying the cornerstone of the rebuilt Monticello.

Although American women would not receive enfranchisement for another two decades, the election of 1900 excited Monticello’s students and faculty. Ruth Bryan, daughter of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, was enrolled in Monticello that year. A parade was organized, booths were set up and speeches were delivered by students as they debated issues such as American policy in the Philippines, which the United States had acquired following the Spanish-American War.

Perhaps Monticello’s most distinguished graduate, Ruth Bryan represented Florida’s Fourth Congressional District from 1929 to 1933. While in Congress, she sponsored a bill to designate the Florida Everglades a national park. Upon assuming the presidency in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Bryan as United States Minister to Denmark, the first woman to hold such a high diplomatic role.

Bryan was an instructor and counselor at Monticello from 1939 to 1944. President Harry Truman in 1949 appointed her an alternate delegate to the United Nations. She died in 1954. Monticello Seminary became Monticello College in 1935 and continued to draw its students, who called themselves “Monti girls,” from across the United States and even several foreign nations. Scholarships allowed women from modest backgrounds the luxury of a Monticello education. Enrollment in the college was a tradition in some families, with students boasting that their mothers and even grandmothers had graduated from the Godfrey landmark.

One of Monticello’s most interesting traditions was the annual election of students to represent the seven ideals of Monticello College: Democracy, Dignity, Loyalty, Beauty, Friendship, Service and Wisdom. The elections were held from 1947 to 1971 — Monticello’s final year.

The college remained unaffected by the tumultuous 1960s. Most Monti girls were as conservative as their well-to-do parents. Chapters of the Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom flourished on campus — but not the Young Democrats, much less 1960s radical organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society. As though to underscore Monticello’s commitment to conservatism and traditional values, the administration invited Senator Barry Goldwater to deliver the 1969 commencement address.

The 1969 school year, however, witnessed one significant milestone that reflected the changing times — the admission of the first African-American student. Monticello had never barred young women on the basis of race and religion. Indeed, the student body had long included a healthy mixture of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish students. As previously noted, at least two Native Americans had attended the Godfrey school in the nineteenth century. The enrollment of its first African-American student proved to be the last major landmark in Monticello’s history.

The 1960s witnessed a revolt against traditional single-gender colleges. Some women’s colleges went coed in an attempt to survive, but Monticello adamantly refused to go that route.

Area residents and many of its alumni admired such allegiance to its founding mission of providing quality education for women only, but the decision sealed Monticello’s fate. The last class graduated in 1971, and the stately old campus is now Lewis and Clark Community College.

Ironically, Monticello’s last graduating class included a descendant of Benjamin Godfrey.

Bibliography:

Hamlin, Griffith A. Monticello: The Biography of a College. Fulton, Missouri: The Ovid Bell Press, 1976.

Hoffman, Judy. God’s Portion: Godfrey, Illinois 1817–1865. Nashville: Cold Tree Press, 2005.

Mitchell, Barbara J. “O Fairest Monticello”: Monticello Female Seminary,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society; Fall 2000 issue.

— . O’ Fairest Monticello. Hallstead, PA: Freedom Acres Press, 2000.

http://everglades.fiu.edu/reclaim/bios/owen.htm; accessed 1/22/07.

Readers will also want to consult the author’s articles “R.V. Cassill: The Monticello Years” and “R.V. Cassill’s The Eagle on the Coin: Forgotten, Landmark LGBT Novel,” both of which have been published on Medium.

John J. Dunphy’s latest book is Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials, which includes interviews with veterans of the U.S. Army’s 7708 War Crimes Group.