ñPARA £PAR@ ` öTEXT ` åFerguson, Abbie Park1837╨1919educatorBorn in Whately, Massachusetts, on April 4, 1837, Abbie Ferguson was the daughter of a Congregational minister. She graduated from Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1856 and then taught school for 13 years, first in Niles, Michigan, in 1856╨1858, and then in New Haven, Connecticut. During 1869╨1871 she lived in France as tutor and companion to two young American girls. In 1873 she learned that the Reverend Andrew Murray, a Dutch Reformed minister of Cape Colony, South Africa, had appealed to Mount Holyoke for assistance in establishing a girls╒ school in South Africa on the work-study principle established by Mary Lyon. Abbie Ferguson and Anna Elvira Bliss (1843╨1925), also a Mount Holyoke graduate, answered the appeal and in November 1873 arrived at Cape Town. They made their way to Wellington, Murray╒s home, and with funds he had already raised opened Huguenot Seminary in January 1874 with 54 girls. The seminary was an immediate success with the Calvinist and largely rural people of Cape Colony, as it promised to train the teachers needed to staff church-oriented schools. In 1875 the seminary was divided into a lower department under Bliss and an upper under Ferguson; the upper placed ten graduates among those certified as teachers by the colony╒s educational authority at the end of that year. In 1884 a Collegiate Department was established, although among South Africans higher education for women was widely viewed with suspicion. Ferguson was also deeply interested in the vast opportunity for missionary work that Africa presented, and through the Women╒s Missionary Society (later the Vrouwen Zending Bond) that she and Bliss formed at Huguenot she worked toward the conversion of a continent. In 1890 a school for entering students was opened in Pearl, and Huguenot Seminary was thereafter limited to secondary and collegiate work. Branches of the seminary were opened in Bethlehem, Orange Free State, and in Greytown, Natal (both now part of the Republic of South Africa). In 1898 the Collegiate Department of Huguenot awarded its first two bachelor╒s degrees and was reorganized as Huguenot College, of which Ferguson was president from then until her retirement in 1910. As the only women╒s college in South Africa, Huguenot was chronically short of money, space, and faculty, but Abbie Ferguson╒s dedication overcame every obstacle. On her return from convalescent leave in Europe and the United States in 1905╨1906 she fought off a faculty plan to merge Huguenot with Victoria College at Stellenbosch and then undertook a strenuous fund-raising campaign that made possible the erection of Ferguson Hall. In 1907 the college was formally chartered by act of Parliament. After her retirement, at which time Bliss succeeded her as president, she devoted much time to organizing and fund-raising through a network of Past Pupils Unions that she had earlier formed and that she merged into the Huguenot General Union in 1914. In 1916 Huguenot College became a constituent of the newly chartered University of South Africa (from 1920 it was Huguenot University College). Abbie Ferguson died at Huguenot on March 25, 1919. ╓styl `
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