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The Manufacture of
Southern Ladies:
Sophia Sosnowski
and Her School
The gracious lady of Southern legend
could chat in French, sing beautifully,
arrange a formal dinner for 50 guests, nurse
sick slaves to health and recite Latin poetry.
She was mostly to be found in the imagina-
tion of novelists, yet there was some basis for
the legend. The daughters of the slave-
holding aristocracy were expected to be
charming, accomplished and cultured, but
the doors of the state and private colieges
were closed to them. Throughout the South,
before ar.d after the Civil War, wealthy
young white women were educated at small
private girls’ schools, usually conducted by
the unmarried or widowed daughters of
prominent families. Some of these schools
offered courses as rigorous as any male
academy or college, but most stressed music,
etiquette and French to the detriment of a
classical or scientific education. These
schools were often located in college towns
where the young ladies could meet marriage
able young men of their social class under
the watchful eyes of their teachers. Athens
was home to two of the best known of these
schools, the Lucy Cobb Institute and the
Home School, conducted by Madame
Sophia Sosnowski.
Sophia Went: was bom in 1808 at
Pforzheim, Baden, now southwestern
Germany. Her father was the court physician
to the Grand Duke of Baden. She received
the best education available to a woman and
was well known for her remarkable singing
voice. In 1835 she married Joseph Sosnowski,
an Polish nobleman exiled after the failed
1830 Polish revolt against Russia. Joseph was a
cousin of Czar Nicholas 1 and of Count
Casimir Pulaski who died at Savannah in the
American Revolution. His grandfather, the
governor of Lithuania, had refused to let his
Josephs aunt marry the Polish revolutionary
hero Koskiuszko because he was of lower
social rank than the Sosnowskis.
Joseph and Sophia emigrated to the
United States and settled in Erie, Pa. What
remained of Joseph’s fortune was wiped out
in a bank failure. He died in 1845, leaving
Sophia with three young children. School
teaching was the only honorable employment
open to a woman of high social standing in
those days, an i Mada-.te Sosnowski took a
position at En..,,a Willard’s Female Seminary
in Troy, N.Y. Her doctor told her that tire
northern winters were ruining her health so
she moved her family to Charleston, S.C.,
where she taught for a few years before taking
a job at the Episcopal school for girls at
Montpelier, Monroe County', Ga.
About 1850 Sophia moved to Columbia,
S.C., and opened her own school for young
ladies, which grew swiftly in size and
reputation. When the Civil War came, she
spent her summer vacations in Virginia as a
nurse in the military hospitals. By early 1865
Madame Sosnowski no longer needed to
travel to the battlefront; it was heading her
way. Sherman’s troops left Savannah on Feb.
1. As they approached Columbia two weeks
later, Madame Sosnowski entrusted her
students to the care of families fleeing the
capitol. She herself had no intention of
leaving. As federal soldiers poured into the
city, she hastily improvised two Masonic
banners that she hung on the front and back
doors of her house and dug her husband’s
Masonic documents from a chest. These
precautions spared her home from destruc
tion, but not from looting. The next day she
went to federal headquarters and made a
protest to Sherman himself.
After the burning of Columbia, the
j trustees of Athens’s well-known Lucy Cobb
Institute offered Sophia Sosnowski the
position of principal. She presided over the
school, assisted by her daughters Sophie and
Caroline. In i 867 her older daughter, Sophie
Schaller, died in childbirth. Shortly
thereafter she left Lucy Cobb and began her
own school for young ladies, first known as
! Madame Sosnowski’s Female Institute, later
i as the Home School.
Tire first location was next to the Lucy
Cobb Institute in the Rucker house at the
comer of Broad and Milledge (only the
magnolias in front of the Varsity remain
today). Within 10 years Madame Sosnowski
moved a few blocks to the old Baxter home
that occupied the block between Hill,
Meigs, Harris and Pope streets in lower
! Cobbham. The Home School never had
more than 50 students, usually divided about
equally between Athens girls and out-of-
town boarding students. Tire school had
| several teachers and offered a general
education, stressing music, drawing and
French; the curriculum seems to have been
less strenuous than that of the Lucy Cobb
Institute, which offered courses in science
to the female brain. The Home School had
no fixed course of study or diplomas; the girls
' studied the useful and ornamental arts and
the c ocial graces until their parents decided
it was time for them to take the Grand Tour
or get married.
After many years on Harris Street, the
Home School moved to the old Lumpkin
! house on Prince Avenue, next to St.
j Joseph’s. It was here that Sophia Sosnowski
died in i 899. Tire school did not continue
I long after this time. Caroline Sosnowski,
who had assisted her mother in running the
! school since its founding, died in 1917.
It is hard to overstate tire importance of
Sophia Sosnowski and a few hundred
women like her in the shaping of Southern
history and culture. More than anyone, they
shaped the manners and beliefs of the
women of the Southern ruling elite,
manners and beliefs that these women
transmitted to their children, who, for good
or ill, governed the region and shaped the
life of the nation for generations.
Next Week: William H. Heard, From
Slave to Ambassador and Bishop.
©1996 John Ryan Seawright
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