UPAR@ ` TEXT ` Grant, Zilpah Polly1794╨1874educatorBorn on May 30, 1794, in Norfolk, Connecticut, Zilpah Grant attended local schools and to the extent her frail health allowed worked to help her widowed mother keep the family farm. From fifteen she taught in district schools in Paug (now East Norfolk), Winchester, and other nearby towns. In 1820 she seized an opportunity to further her own education and entered the Female Seminary of Byfield, Massachusetts, operated by the Reverend Joseph Emerson. A year later she became a teacher in the school. Later still she taught in a girls╒ school in Winsted, Connecticut, and in 1823╨1824 she was again at Emerson╒s school, which had moved to Saugus, Massachusetts. In 1824 she accepted the position of preceptress of the newly endowed Adams Female Academy in what is now East Derry, New Hampshire. She was accompanied there by her younger colleague from the Reverend Emerson╒s school, Mary Lyon. She established a rigorous three-year course with examinations required for promotion from one grade to the next and with a diploma awarded for successful completion. The academy flourished and gained a considerable reputation. The intrusion of the trustees, however, prompted Grant to leave in 1828, taking Lyon and a number of pupils with her, and to establish the Ipswich Female Seminary along the same lines in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In spite of her convalescent absence in 1832╨1833 the school prospered, and with Lyon she began to plan a New England Female Seminary for Teachers. But in 1835 Mary Lyon left to begin the work that would lead to the founding of Mount Holyoke Seminary, and four years later the Ipswich Seminary closed. Grant moved to Dedham, Massachusetts, and in September 1841 married William B. Banister, a lawyer and politician of Newburyport. (He died in 1853). In 1852 she became a member of the board of managers of the American Woman╒s Educational Association, founded by Catharine Beecher, and was active in the program to recruit and train teachers for schools in the West, making a tour of colleges and seminaries for that purpose in 1855╨1856. In the latter year she published a pamphlet of Hints on Education. Her last years she devoted increasingly to religion. She died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1874. ■styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ( !I í !I ▐ ¬ !I V 5¬ W !I ƒ !I ▐ ░ !I !I æ !I .link ` HYPR í ¬HYPR ƒ ░
