Sophia B. Packard

Who was Sophia B. Packard?

Sophia B. Packard was an American educator, cofounder in Atlanta, Georgia, of a school for African American women that would eventually become Spelman College.

Packard attended local district school and from the age of 14 alternated periods of study with periods of teaching in rural schools. In 1850 she graduated from the Charlestown Female Seminary, and after teaching for several years she became preceptor and a teacher at the New Salem Academy in 1855. After a short-lived attempt to operate her own school in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in partnership with her longtime companion, Harriet E. Giles, Packard taught at the Connecticut Literary Institution in Suffield. From 1864 to 1867 she was co-principal of the Oread Collegiate Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. She then moved to Boston, where she secured in 1870 the unusual position of pastor's assistant under the Reverend George C. Lorimer of the Shawmut Avenue Baptist Church and later of the Tremont Temple. In 1877 she presided over the organizing meeting of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society, of which she was chosen treasurer that year and corresponding secretary the next.