Anna Peck Sill

Anna Peck Sill (August 9, 1816 – June 18, 1889) was an American educator and the founder of Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford University), a school for the Christian education of young women in Rockford, Illinois, as an adjunct to Beloit College of Beloit, Wisconsin. Sill and the seminary were so vitally related that the life-story of one was the history of the other. She took her inspiration from Mary Lyon and modeled the Rockford school after Mount Holyoke Seminary. Sill retired in 1884, after 35 years as Rockford's principal, five thousand women having graduated under her. Early life and education Anna Peck Sill was born in Burlington, New York, August 9, 1816. She was the youngest of ten children, and inherited the intellectual and moral qualities of a long line of Puritan ancestry. The family was descended from John Sill, of England, who with his wife Joanna emigrated to the U.S. in 1637, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven years after the settlement of the town, and the same year in which Harvard College was founded. About 1789, her grandparents removed with their families from Lyme, Connecticut, to Otsego County, New York, at that time a wilderness, and settled in the neighborhood of what is now Burlington. Her grandfather, Deacon Andrew Sill, was a prominent member of the Congregational Church in Lyme, and held the office of deacon for 31 years. He was a patriot soldier in the Revolutionary war. Her father, Abel Sill, was a farmer, who died of typhoid fever in 1824, at the age of 50, when Anna was seven years old.