Patapsco Female Institute and the women who ran it

As pictured in 1854, the institute (opened 1837) was managed or owned by three ladies ... and a few men.  The most well-known, from 1841 to 1856, was Almira Phelps who moved in with her family and made it a nationally celebrated school. Sarah Randolph, author and great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, was the last director from 1879 to 1885. A descendant of one of the Ellicott founders, Lilly Elliott owned it from1891 until her death in 1924; first as her home, then hotel, then as a WWI hospital.

Almira (Hart) Lincoln Phelps (1793-1884) 

1837-1856 Educator and writer from Connecticut, Phelps was the youngest of seventeen children of a Revolutionary War captain   Her first of many successful textbooks, commonly called “Lincoln’s Botany” (1829) was in the new field of botany.  After running several schools, in 1841 Phelps became the director for the next fifteen years of the Patapsco Female Institute (opened 1837) in Ellicott City. She raised the curriculum to make it a nationally renowned school for girls; increasing enrollment to 150.  She loaned students money to attend the school, and navigated the turbulent years preceding the Civil War saying the “North and South meet here.”

Sarah Nicholas Randolph (1839-1892) 

1879-1885 The youngest child of Thomas Jefferson Randolph (grandson of Thomas Jefferson), Randolph was Principal of the Patapsco Female Institute from 1879-1885.  She then opened 'Miss Randolph's School for Young Ladies' in Baltimore.  

In 1934 the 'Sarah N. Randolph Patapsco Alumnae Association' was founded and her former students held reunions on Institute grounds or at Monticello to visit her grave and where a tomb chest monument was “erected in loving memory of Sarah N. Randolph, by her pupils.”

Randolph was also the author of The Domestic life of Thomas Jefferson, 1871 and The Life of Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, 1876.

Annie Matchett and Amanda Taylor

Annie Matchett ran PFI from 1885-1886
Amanda Taylor 1886- ?fall 1888
For more details see comment below. In the future I may try to write more on these ladies.

Lilly (Tyson) Manly Elliott    (1852-1924)

A granddaughter of Martha Ellicott Tyson, Lilly Tyson was a descendant of two prominent Quaker milling and merchant families – the Tysons of Jericho Mills north of Baltimore and the Ellicott founders of Ellicott City. Martha Ellicott Tyson (daughter of George Ellicott) helped found Swathmore College, wrote a biography of Benjamin Banneker and was born in the  George Ellicott house. Lilly married Gason Manly in 1879 and had two daughters.

Lilly's father James E. Tyson bought the old hilltop girls school buildings, and in 1891 she used it as a home. In 1902 she married A. Marshall Elliott, (no C as in Ellicott) a noted professor at Johns Hopkins, and turned her huge home into the Berg Alnwick hotel.  It was a 150 bed Maryland Women’s War Relief Hospital during WWI.  Lilly died in 1924 and her surviving daughter eventually sold “Warwick” as it was called in the mid1930s, and it became a summer theater then a nursing home.

©2018 Patricia Bixler Reber
Forgotten history of Ellicott City & Howard County MD