Rockford University: 175 years a By Bern Sundstedt '77 Institutions that endure for 175 years are unique creatures. To establish such fragile constructs, it requires of their founders a certain brand of courage and a disciplined resolve. To fortify those frameworks, it takes an ongoing, collective dedication from successive stakeholders to embody and forward their institutions’ missions while holding a continual commitment to adaptation and change. Such is the through-line of Rockford University. On June 20, 1844, an assembly of Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers met in Cleveland. From that convention, the following resolution was adopted. “Exigencies of Wisconsin and northern Illinois require that those sections should unite in establishing a college for men and a female seminary of the highest order – one in Wisconsin near to Illinois and the other in Illinois near to Wisconsin.” Immediately following that event, a group of seven attendees crowded around a long, narrow table in a stateroom on the steamer ship Chesapeake as it sailed west on Lake Erie. By journey’s end, those emissaries had committed themselves, and those they represented, to create a men’s college in Beloit, Wisconsin, and a seminary for women in northern Illinois.
By February 25, 1847, a charter had been drawn, giving birth to Rockford Female Seminary. At the time there were fewer than 10 such institutions exclusively for women in a United States that numbered only 29. Two years later, on a sunny June morning in 1849, Anna Peck Sill, the seminary’s first principal, rang her now-famous bell to greet the first student body: 53 fresh faces, several under the age of 12. Among the youngest of those assembled was a special group of seven. Because Miss Sill playfully ascribed a flower’s name to each, they became known as the “Floral Band.” The seminary’s academic curriculum was established to give young women a thorough and systematic education based in religious ethics and centered on the development of character. The first “collegiate” class enrolled in 1851, and soon after the 1852 construction of Middle Hall (the seminary’s first permanent building on the original downtown campus), members of the Floral Band mischievously etched their
Forward-thinking families wanted to provide for their daughters and young women across our nation the same opportunities afforded their sons. They wanted to make the Rock River Valley an attractive place to locate, raise families, and grow businesses.
The first classes held at Rockford Female Seminary were taught by the university’s first president, Anna Peck Sill, in the former downtown courthouse.
A drawing of Old Campus featuring Talcott (formerly Chapel), Middle, and Linden halls.
Old Campus in 1877. 4 CATALYST
