I started a new quilt top as soon as I returned to Michigan and have a third of it sewn together so I decided to take a break to respond to this week’s Lens-Artist Challenge: The Rule of Thirds. About a third of the distance home we stopped to spend a week-end with our daughter in Winston-Salem where she moved last December to start a new job at Salem Academy and College. We went for a walk-about of the campus and both of us were instantly smitten. They were celebrating their 250th anniversary with homecoming and graduation ceremonies. Old Salem is a living museum and Salem Academy and College is a part of this museum.

Salem Academy and College, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is a women’s college (Bachelor and Master degrees) and girl’s academy – the oldest private educational institution for women & girls in the United States. The Moravian Church settled the town of Salem beginning in 1771 and the town was built to facilitate the Moravian core value of a holistic form of wellness that included physical, mental and spiritual growth. They had established a single brothers school in 1771 and wanted to provide the same for girls. In 1772 the town opened their school for single sisters and the girls lived in a cramped church residence until 1782 when the single sisters and older girls choir moved to their own residence. Although the Academy and College no longer are associated with the Moravian Church, the history of its early beginnings is evident in the buildings they use for girls’ and women’s educational activities.

The literature I’ve read uses the phrases single brothers, single sisters and choir frequently and I spent a lot of time wondering what it meant. Finally I learned that “choir” relates to the segregation used in the Moravian Church to separate males and females in worship and for learning when young people were still single. I look forward to learning more about the progressive educational system instituted by the Moravians in Old Salem.

According to the http://oldsalem.org web site, “Schools for girls were rare in the early South.  In Salem, Single Sister Elisabeth Oesterlein began a small day school for girls in 1772.  By 1788, families across the South were asking if their daughters could come to Salem to receive an education.

In 1805, a girl’s boarding school was constructed in Salem, and the first class had 30 girls from across the South.  Girls took classes in reading, writing, syntax, history, geography, music, drawing and needlework.  In the late 1880s, the school was approved to offer a college education as well as the traditional preparatory program” provided by the Academy.

You have probably caught on that I didn’t get last week’s Lens-Artist Challenge “Rule of Thirds” finished before this week’s challenge of “Light and Shadow” was published. If I wait a couple more days I could integrate a third challenge into this post. Is including a third challenge too “shadowy” to fit into the “rule of thirds?”