Emily Prudden (1832-1917), who became permanently deaf from the age of seventeen, was a Connecticut native who raised her late sister’s son and daughter and cared for her widowed mother as a young and middle-aged woman. At the age of fifty she became a housemother at Brainerd Institute in Chester, South Carolina. Two years later she acquired fifty acres in Gaston County, North Carolina, and founded Jones Seminary, which later became Linwood College. Subsequently she founded schools at Blowing Rock, Saluda, Elk Park, Lawndale, Mill Springs, Hudson, Lick Mountain, Cedar Valley, and Brevard. In 1888 she established Lincoln Academy nearby for African-American females. She also founded schools for African-Americans at Elk Park, Lawndale, Golden, and Uree, In all, she founded fifteen schools, ten for whiles and five for African-Americans, before she retired in 1909 to Blowing Rock. The school at Lick Mountain has become the present-day Pfeiffer College, and other schools she founded were incorporated into county school systems. It was estimated that before she died, over 10,000 students had been educated at schools she established. This book is the first book-length study of Emily Prudden and the schools she founded. The author, Dr. Phoebe A. Pollitt serves in the Nursing Department at Appalachians State University. She is also the author of African American Hospitals in North Carolina and African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia.
Columbia, South Carolina: Create Space Independent Publishing Platford, 2018. 152 pages. Trade paperback