Location: US 52 (Main Street) in Ansonville
County: Anson
Original Date Cast: 1949
Established in 1850 by a group of locally prominent landowners, Carolina Female College was placed under the auspices of the Methodist Church. A sum of $20,000 went toward construction of the college building. Young women aged ten to twenty, many of them daughters of ministers, from as far away as Mississippi attended. The first president was the Reverend Alexander B. Smith of Anson County. Classes were suspended from 1862 to 1864 owing to an outbreak of typhoid fever and to the Civil War.
The school closed in 1867 at which time stockholders placed the property in the hand of the South Carolina Methodist Episcopal Conference. Residents of the Palmetto State, however, evinced little interest in the institution. Local secondary school classes were held in the old building until about 1885. For some years thereafter it served as an apartment house but by the mid-twentieth century the structure was in state of decay and was demolished in the 1950s.
References:
Mary L. Medley, History of Anson County, North Carolina, 1750-1976 (1976)
Charles Lee Raper, The Church and Private Schools of North Carolina (1896)
William S. Powell, ed., Encyclopedia of North Carolina (2006)