In 1714 Christopher Dock, a German, opened a school at Skippach, below what is now Pottstown, about thirty miles from this large assemblage of educated young ladies. Christopher Dock was a man of real learning, unexcelled by any outside of Pennsylvania in his time. His "Schule Ordnung" written in 1750 and printed by Christopher Sauer, of Germantown, 1770, was the first treatise on education produced in type in the American colonies. The leaders in the German emigration prior to the American Revolution were often men of the highest scholastic training.
In New England began the earliest systematic preliminaries and expansion in the line of schooling. It has the honor, as I have shown, of founding the second institution of higher learning which survives today. James Otis, Samuel and John Adams, foremost agitators on the legal technicalities of opposition to England, were the best types of the output of New England's educational opportunities of the times.
It is one of the greatest tributes to our forefathers that with these limited and more frequently rude means of getting an education there should have been so many examples of brain and culture to meet the educational requirements of the conflict with the British Crown, the preparation of documents which stood the most critical scrutiny, and as well the preparation and negotiating of correspondence, conventions and treaties to compare favorably with the most advanced university educated statesmen of the Old World.
What I have said applies to men, but what about the young women of the same period? Except in the few largest towns where some enterprising woman was courageous enough of her own volition to establish a school for young ladies, the education of women was not considered of importance. The Moravians were the first and most notable exceptions. The seminary at Bethlehem, almost in sight of where we are now gathered, was famous in Revolutionary days.
In New York and Philadelphia there was an occasional fashionable "school" for young ladies.
Abigail Smith, who became wife of John Adams, one of the earliest agitators and leaders of the contest, one of the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, first Vice-President and second President of the United States, was a woman of education. Being the daughter of a Congregational preacher and having a taste for books, her father devoted much care to her instruction.
As John Adams, on account of his radical patriotism was the man the British authorities most feared, and were looking for, the letters of Mrs. Adams to her husband and his replies are valuable contributions to American history.
They were perfect in writing, spelling, grammar and composition. I may add, though, of a date long after, history is indebted to her letters to her daughter for the only eye witness account we have of the trials and tribulations of the journey of the President's family from Philadelphia to Washington, in the fall of 1800, then the new seat of government, getting lost in the woods and taking possession of the unfinished President's palace, as it was called, without firewood during bleak November days and nights with no looking glasses, lamps, nor anything else to make a President's wife comfortable.
As a rule, young women were not educated in books, but taught to sew, knit, spin, weave, cook, wash, iron and perform all other household requirements. Her value in the scale of life was in proportion as she was skilled in the duties of a housewife. This was the real type of womanhood in those days, and should always be, with a cultivated mind added.
When we read of their heroic maintenance of the home, care and training of children, management of the farm, sale of its products and often facing hardships in keeping the wolf from the door, while husbands, sons and brothers were fighting for liberty and independence, we care not whether they could read, write, spell, cast up accounts or not, but think of their woman's contribution to the success of the contest.