Born in Burlington, New York, on August 9, 1816, Anna Sill attended a local rural school. At twenty she began teaching in a school in Barre, New York. In 1837 she entered Miss Phipps╒ Union Seminary in Albion, New York, and the next year she became a teacher there. In 1843 she opened a seminary in Warsaw, New York, and from 1846 to 1849 she headed the female department of the Cary Collegiate Institute in Oakfield, New York. For some years she had wavered between teaching and foreign missionary work; deciding at length in favor of teaching, she accepted in July 1849 an invitation to open a girls╒ school in Rockford, Illinois. It was the hope of Rockford╒s citizens that such a school would grow into the female seminary for which the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West (founder of Beloit College) had already obtained a charter. The school opened with 60 pupils. In September 1850 it was indeed chosen as the foundation for the seminary, and in June 1852, with the seminary already crowded and a second building under construction, Anna Sill was confirmed as principal of Rockford Female Seminary. In 1854 a three-year course was instituted, and it was lengthened to four in 1865.
Anna Sill exercised a firm discipline over her students, only gradually evolved a pedagogy more advanced than rote learning of religious and classical matter, and was always primarily concerned with education as a tool of religion. Nonetheless she maintained high standards and made the school a leader in women╒s education in the Midwest. During the 1870s she began urging that the school be raised to collegiate status. It became a degree-granting institution in 1882, although not until ten years later was the name changed to Rockford College. Anna Sill retired in 1884 and continued to live on the campus until her death there on June 18, 1889.
